


Ownership

by pettiot



Series: Ownership!AU [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Alienation, Double Entendre, F/M, Immaturity, Misogyny, Past Rape, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Xenophobia, growing together, honest adolescent lust, hurt comfort, past trauma, self hatred, sex and identity, terrible puns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-25
Updated: 2010-07-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:22:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22416202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pettiot/pseuds/pettiot
Summary: To gamble with trust is to risk losing what should never be lost, but when your pockets are otherwise bare...
Relationships: Fran/Balthier
Series: Ownership!AU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1614181
Comments: 3
Kudos: 4





	Ownership

At their first meeting, Balthier is loading his gun.

Fran knows him from the dual-wing design of his ship and the word around Balfonheim. Balthier is the only name he gives, and the Strahl is noted as an ambitious Archadian theft.

He glances up at Fran when she offers her assistance, one long look for each of her ears. Without a change in expression he turns his attention back to his gun. He has long fingers, perfect nails despite the dirt under each, and has the strange habit of licking his forefinger and running it about the chamber's rim before he slots each shot home. When he is done, he lifts the weight of that great gun with one hand, cocks it with a nonchalant touch, and rests it back on his shoulder before he looks at her again.

His eyes are a colour Fran has seen only rarely, one she cannot name for the mix of many. The circle of his iris is writ in feathered gold, but it is the green that lights with the sun's flame.

"Experienced, are you," he says, or asks; she cannot read the tone of his voice.

"For longer than you measure your life."

"Have you an appreciation for innovation?"

"I walk a path away from that which I was born to."

"Do you enjoy fingerwork?" He slides the gun's shaft along his shoulder, up and back. From the glint in his eyes, he is overly aware of what the mannerism suggests. "Or do you have a penchant for getting dirty?"

Fran considers that, the grounded, half-sunk Strahl behind him, the Golmore mud that slimes him to his waist, the fragmented spread of the damaged – and highly unusual – glossair configuration before him. It is that configuration, his airship's navigational heart, over which he has kept his guard. The myst within the metal has been drawing the beasts of the jungle to attack. For her, it was the smoke trail from those devastated trees that had her turn her hover from the route back to Balfonheim's shores to deviate in his direction.

"If you keep your guard attendant," she says, "I will set the rings to functionality again. Considering the existing state of filth over your lower self, you can convey it back to the airship's ventral bay."

Balthier glances back at the stinking mud in which his ship sits. As if his contemplation has weight, the earth gives. A great bubble of gas sprays mud along the upper curve.

"As you wish, my dear. I would have suggested such a positioning myself had you not. I could hardly expect a woman to set herself to anything but the fine work."

Fran bends to the task. It is too much explanation here to contradict his last statement. His tools are as immaculately kept as his gun. The snarled rings hone smooth as swiftly as she can bear the rasp, myst sparking at her even strokes. His gun fires a deafening defense over her shoulder. She scents gunpowder, myst, and alchemical addenda in his shot.

This will take some time; for that strange, dual-wing design, she can read the added complexity in the rings and know she will need precision.

Balthier's aim with his gun is exceptional. The beasts never get near enough to have her reach for her bow. If only, she thinks, Balthier could have transferred that precision to his pilot's chair.

.

There are two things Fran learns of Balthier within those early days of acquaintance.

The first fact is that he detests debt with such rancor it is as though the paper that notes his deficit marks instead the sale of his soul. Such a thing she has witnessed before in all races, but never to the extent that Balthier would carry it. He pays his bills grudgingly and without grace. He argues with the Moogle mechanics for well over two hours before he settles on a price for his limping ship's repairs. With the loot from his meagre hunt sold, he pays her for her rescue service to the hour, to the last, fragmented half-gil. He does this before she even asks, counts every coin out and insists she does the same. Balthier knows the value of everything and the worth of nothing.

The only willing expense he surrenders is for his bed. They room, as pirates without property or ships often do, in the Whitecap. He sleeps down the hall, near the bathhouse where it is quiet at night and loud in the morning. She beds towards the front, where it is cheaper, and where she cannot sleep for the songs.

Fran is thus positioned to watch both his early evening performance as well as his post-midnight endeavor, to learn of his unusual nightly preference.

It is not the act which Fran attends, but more the story his insistent performance attempts to shroud. Viera have ever considered the only way to ensure purity of both thought and way is to surround oneself with solitude, and failing that, with sameness. What Fran notes instead is the contrary aggression with which Balthier approaches others, as though he himself cannot determine his own want but for that he must spite as many as he can along the way.

His evening performance involves only the Whitecap's women: his arrogance makes him as myst to an entite for those females that cluster about him. Fran sees symmetry in his features and grace in his height, but nothing otherwise exceptional, a certain bland flatness in features when he is still. He insults women and waiting whores alike: when he sends one to buy him a drink, he fondles, pinches and pouts at those that remain. All inevitable wounds are mysteriously soothed by his whiskey-wet smile.

For that game, Balthier pays for nothing under the Whitecap's roof: no whiskey, no whore, nothing but his own bed. To that, not quite nightly, he takes not a woman but instead some sky-struck boy fresh to Balfonheim's freedom. Those Balthier fishes from the docklands once his first act is over, baiting rebellious innocence with the shine of his later role.

Fran watches when Balthier ushers his latest catch past the Whitecap's sulking women. Apart from youth, he reveals no preference to physical type. The only similarity Fran notes is that the boys always wear a bewildered, grateful wonderment on their features, a kind of awe. Fran wonders that Balthier, young enough himself, would seek such an imbalanced adoration when Balfonheim offers one of the few cities in Ivalice where equality is not left wanting: the muckpile is a great leveller.

Balthier stays past dawn, always: in the bed he paid for, he will wring the full benefit from every gil of time.

.

When next Fran sees Balthier at the Whitecap, there is much humour in the air for the latest damage to the Strahl.

He is unhappy, though Fran reads that more from the set of his shoulders than his behavior. He meets every laughing comment with one to top it with sarcasm, and such a bright grin that the malice towards him turns to gentle mockery. He seems jovial enough for the level of his intoxication. That drunkenness surprises her. Past observation tells her Balthier drinks, but never to debilitate.

He dances with a wide-hipped girl in his arms to the tune of the fiddler's jig. His heels meet the floorboards hard as though force makes up for grace. Fran has had enough of the crowd long before the Hume gathering will end. When she tries to move past the dancing crowd to get to her room, she hears that Balthier is singing. The words belong to another tune—

"—with no plans and too much time, I'll have another glass of wine, ho; horizons always there to shine, yo, yet never to be mine, so—whoa, you'll do."

Balthier shoves the girl in his arms to one side, disregards her squawk, and straightens in front of Fran. His eyes nearly meet hers, though he squints, one eye more than the other. The effect is disconcerting. Fran is not used to Hume men being so tall.

"You'll do," he announces again, loudly. His voice is straighter than the stink of spirits would dictate. "F-Fryn, wasn't it? No. Fran."

"What is it you think I'll do?"

His hair is unruly, his jaw and neck unshaven. His shirt and vest are unlaced to the bottom of his breastbone, baring a startlingly hairy chest. "Why, whatever you want to, my dear."

Balthier falls in behind her when she thinks to simply move away from his drunkenness. Fran stops at the bar's end rather than go back to her room. He would undoubtedly follow her there, if she so led him. He orders her a drink. Or rather, he asks what she wants, orders that as well as a whiskey, yet when the glasses arrive he takes a mouthful of her wine before she can touch it.

"Thank you," she says.

At the dryness in her voice he startles. For a moment the façade slips as he looks into the red depths of that wine; he is abashed.

"In honesty," he says, "in wine-laced honesty, my dear, I have a proposition for you that may contradict all expectations you have of me."

"Our ways do not align," Fran replies. "Your proposition cannot interest me."

"Pirate engineer," Balthier says, as though she has not spoken. "There's not too many of them about, I never thought to find someone else as interested in the guts as well as the glory. You handled the Strahl's rings well that day out there without even asking what the extra one was for. You simply understood. I hadn't expected a-- woman to know more than the essentials. I was impressed."

"I," Fran said, "was not."

"Bah." He waves that away, and at last surrenders her wine. She does not take the glass. The print of his lips is clear on the rim. "You know what those bastard Moogles want to charge me for the Strahl's latest repairs?"

"Did you not learn from the first time that you cannot land an airship with that doubled wingspan in a field full of trees?"

He grimaces. "Archadian aggressors are harder to dodge than trees. Stray fire causes somewhat more damaging if less shameful an impact than a tree. I flew high and sleepless for three days to get the Strahl back here with enough of her hull intact to still call her an airship."

"Your ship is too large for a single man to pilot with ease."

"Yes. I know. I have – tried, with others aboard." He hesitates, and gives a brittle laugh. "I have yet to meet a man worthy of my trust in this den of thieves."

Fran closes her eyes, an elongated blink; something in his hesitation does not ring true. Sight has ever been a Hume sense, the predominant one in a city full of thick stinks and random noise. In the shadow-drowned Wood sight means very little compared to the other senses. In that moment of sightlessness, Fran scents Balthier, hears him. The tight rhythm of his heart is too much for the dance, and instead sounds of anxiety; the sharp stink of his sweat is more than whiskey and good-spirit, and instead smells of stress.

When Fran opens her eyes, it is as though two men stand before her. She does not know which sense to trust. Her sight shows her Balthier's arrogant shoulder; his scent speaks of another man's uncertainty.

"Yet in this den of thieves, I have seen you meet many men."

Balthier shrugs at her, and sets his back to the bar. His height lets his elbows rest comfortably on that high wood. One long-fingered hand scratches idly at his chest. "Lust isn't trust, my dear. Quite the inverse. I would have thought an age-wise one as yourself would have determined that some years ago."

"What do you want of me, Balthier? Your commentary wanders a path far from that of your thought."

"I need money to pay the Moogles. They won't release my ship. There's a hunt mark up – the reward would cover my repairs and more besides, but it's – dangerous. A difficult mark. I can't take it down alone. Nor could you." He meets her eyes then. "If you would accompany me, I'll split the remainder with you."

"Your seconds? Hardly appetising."

"Come on, love, the street word says you've taken other hunts, other partnerships before. You fight long distance, an archer. That's one preference we share; hand to hand's too risky." He hesitates. "I know you need the money. Word also says you're sleeping on a bare mattress to spare the gil for linen. Please."

He swallows that last word with his whiskey.

It is a Hume penchant to befriend, though the Viera word for such behavior is closer to 'corruption' than 'friendship'. Fran has observed the habit as she observes them. Humes find sanctuary in spreading so, in corrupting until there is no trace of the individual's original, untouched core. From birth to death, a Hume lives for the lives of others. For a Hume there is no succor in silence, in solitude. The Viera way has always been to find assurance in solitude, that the word of the Wood's way remains pure and untainted by the words or touch of others. The Wood's way shifts slowly, millennia of slow growth; a Hume's path instead changes swiftly, to ride the tide. Fran has not heard the Wood's word for long years, yet those long years have nevertheless been spent in solitude. She is, still, Viera; it is her nature.

Fran regards Balthier, the dichotomy that becomes him. His lips, sardonic; his eyes, quite otherwise. The thought occurs to Fran that she has never met a man so skilled at corrupting – at befriending – others, to still be so friendless. He asks her because she has helped him once before, and entirely unprompted.

It would be quite sad to think her aid may well be the only unprovoked act of amity anyone ever offered the man, so Fran does not consider that even as she considers the other. Balthier is a self-made stranger even surrounded by his own kind.

"Split the entirety equally. And perhaps."

"All women think they deserve half a man's labor, but I'll not disillusion you: half is as unlikely as Vayne Solidor marrying a Viera. You wouldn't have been aware of the hunt without me, it's not on the common boards, and I assure you there's little chance you could bring it down yourself. Thirds, I'll go, one to you and two to me. I only need backup, not for you to take the brunt of the risk on my part. Unless," he gestures randomly, spilling his whiskey onto his pant-leg, "you have some especial feminine skill that allows you to slay a beast with your breasts, in which case I will reconsider."

"Find a man to trust at your back if you think me so incapable."

"I do not want a man at my back." He says it a trifle too vehemently.

"For a man would want half of your dividends, with no grace for burdens or who bears them?"

Scent acrid, thick with lies. But perhaps he appreciates the avenue she offers him out. "You understand! You are at the disadvantage in a Hume city. You impress me again."

"There is a name for Humes like you, Balthier. Some mystery rises within me as to why I am considering accepting your offer."

A sneer curls his lip, yet his eyes are wounded. "Regardless of what you've heard, I'm not."

"That is not the name I would call you." Fran leans forward, and he does not retreat. The scent of him rises, conflicting, conflicted. Her lips nearly touch his ear; his grin is a smirk but he stinks of sudden terror. She whispers: "Misogynist."

"A trifle selective, love." He steps back, drains his whiskey in a single gulp and slams his empty glass onto the bar. "I don't like anyone. Misanthropist, if you must make a miss of me."

"Tis your fortune then, that I am Viera, and entirely unconcerned as to the extent of your regard."

He nods at the stairs. "I'll see you down here tomorrow. Not a minute before noon, if you please."

.

On the morrow Balthier shows no trace of his night's debilitation. He is clean-shaven, if somewhat raw for that he used scented soap instead of lather. His clothing is stiff-starched, touched with lace to offset the leather. His guns smell of expensive oil, engraved, stylized metal gleaming as though to contradict their status as weapons.

Balthier talks while they stake their hunt's terrain, regardless that Fran does not give him reason to do so. He knows he fights well, and has been marked as such. He knows he flies dangerously, and is ridiculed for it. He knows that everyone in Balfonheim knows his name for his ship's dual-wing distinction, not for his skill. Balthier knows he is known for more vice than virtue.

The strangeness is that he considers that latter a matter for some pride.

It is in the late afternoon, and full of pride for the hunt's haul that he offers to shout her a pipe or three. Fran accepts regardless of her preference, mostly to call his bluff. He is far too young, too falsely cocky to know how to navigate the shoals of Balfonheim's seedy underside.

He holds open the den's leaf-carved door for her, mocking. "You forget the extent of my experience with the backsides of things."

Indeed, the proprietor knows him, nods, and does not ask for an entrance fee. The attendant leads them to a private room, three-walled only and particularly well-cushioned. The current patrons scarcely stir for their passing. The scent in here is thick, pungent, to blur Fran's vision and corrupt her primary sense. She feels most unusual watching Balthier's deft navigation of the den.

Awaiting them is an intricate array of handcrafted sweets and coffee steaming in twinned porcelain cups. Fran notes the great velvet curtains gathered against the walls. With the tug of a silken cord, the room can be closed.

"You were prepared for my acceptance." She settles into the cushions, on her stomach, and nods at the curtains. "Your own expectation is evident."

Balthier shrugs back, up on one elbow and one leg cocked open. "It's especially rare that I meet with rejection. Do you appreciate the expense?"

"Are you Archadian, Balthier?"

He chews thoughtfully on a sugared rosebud, his fingers busy with the pipe. Even there he pauses to lick his finger to run about the rim before he packs the bud within. "It wasn't my accent; I know I've cultured that well away from Archadian cadence. I'm curious, what gave me away?"

"You use Vayne Solidor's name as a curse; your selection of vices."

"Leaf is a vice scarcely limited to Archadians."

"I refer to your obsession with where you spend."

He responds to that with a sly smile. "Come or currency? Perhaps another miss for you - a miser. That's not solely an Archadian bent. I'll call it your women's intuition."

As he touches a taper to the pipe, she surprises herself with her sharpness. "You persist in speaking a fallacy I would have you amend. I am not a woman."

The first inhalation has him cough, practiced; he proffers the pipe. "Do you bear children? Do you suckle? —No, don't bother to answer with words, the questions were rhetorical. Your hips affirm the first, the considerable expanse of your breast the second."

"I am a Viera. That is all."

His left eyebrow rises at that, the corner of his lip to match. His offering doesn't waver. Fran relents and takes the pipe. He has selected a mild crop for this first draw. She inhales deeply, to watch as his eyes drop to her breasts. His expression seems purely scientific, his lips sardonic. It is only in the confusion of his eyes that she sees true interest.

"How do you breed, then?"

"Through choice."

"Intriguing. Mere mental control, is it, or do you intend those words as some form of allusion to sisterly interaction?" He lifts her free hand from the pillow and measures his fingers against hers. "Those fingernails would certainly make of the latter quite a complex task."

His palm is warm and dry. His fingers are as long as hers, if without the claw, and as he notes, would be far more versatile in varied applications for that lack. For a time she contemplates his touch, and draws again on the smolder. She puts the pipe directly to his lips after. He sucks obediently, hollowing his cheeks far more than is necessary.

"The viera capture nigh a hundred Hume males and set them loose in the heart of Golmore's jungle with but a single weapon between them. Come nightfall my sisters will return, and the single surviving victor of that life and death struggle we convey to the village. There we indulge all our needs for procreation, that in a single night a new generation of Viera are conceived."

Smoke curls from his nostrils, a snorted exhalation. "Do you think I was born in the doorway?"

There is something quite charming about him, she must admit that. It shows in his smile, in the occasional relaxation of his shoulders. She wonders if his arrogance is the mask, or the charm; Archadians have a noted tendency to love their masks.

"It is a sacred matter, though it is indeed one of choice and natural selection."

"Unlike Hume females," he notes. He knocks the ash from the pipe with practiced motion and contemplates the selection of buds remaining. "It does seem rather untoward that we profess the prominence of Hume intellectual prowess only to fall prey to lust-driven, flesh-bound chance with our offspring."

He gives the fresh pipe to her this time, holding the taper cupped so the heat curls away from her face. She draws delicately, yet deep enough that her ribcage swells against the pillows. This is a sharper crop, much stronger. She closes her eyes against the world's instability and listens as Balthier tokes, coughs, and tokes again.

"Yet if Viera truly have no male counterpart, then why have you evolved – through natural selection, no doubt – to possess attributes to sway any right-thinking male Hume to your cause?"

"Defense," Fran replies, and snorts inelegantly when smoke catches in her throat. "The theory of one of your Archadian scholars. An evolutionary defense, most similar to that of a flower that develops beauty to call an insect's attention. Hume males are particularly predatory when it comes to territory, and are likewise prone to defer and defend outward feminine fertility."

"Most Hume males." When he draws again he raises his smallest finger to make his point evident, and meets her eyes through the smoke.

"Yes. Such feminine presentation clearly has only small effect on a man as yourself, to drive you to protect and defend my person."

"Come now. I am as debonair as any a male when presented with a pair of perfect breasts cupped together, as yours currently are, between a pair of perfect elbows."

Fran glances down at herself. He is right, considering her current posture. The support of her armor does much to assist and little to conceal, yet such exposure is well beside the point.

"Hardly debonair."

"Ah, well," he says, "hard, perhaps. One out of three's not a bad guess, my dear."

He looks down at his groin. She follows his gaze. His current posture, reclining on his side with one knee angled to the ceiling, has the leather of his trousers buckle to hide any evidence of his interest.

"I've never had the intention to fuck with boys," he tells his groin, "and indeed, I don't, exclusively. I'm just, as you note, especially careful with my-- currency. I'll not be trapped again."

Fran rises, struggling to walk against the excess cloy of cushion, and frees the curtains from their sash; she sees no point in further conversation to confirm his intent. It is for this he has brought her here.

Red velvet falls, heavy, to conceal, to cut sound and smoke alike. In this suggestion of privacy she attends the clasps of her corsetry. When she turns about again Balthier has unlaced his shirt, unbuckled his belt, and nothing else.

He drinks first, crisp clear water, and pours her a glass also. The sound of the pour sparks her thirst.

"I much prefer leaf to brew for intoxication. The latter always bloats me. Yet the former has its own downside; it always makes me feel like a sun-dried hide." Balthier sits up to offer her the glass, and despite her nudity, meets only her eyes. "Care to wet your own lips?"

She drinks. He walks on his knees through the cushions to kneel before her, his hands sliding up along her thighs. The wet, cold touch of his tongue at the furrow of her cunt startles her. She had not thought he would, but he does, if only so lightly it feels like a taunt. She bends her knees slightly to afford him easier access, but at that encouragement he pulls away.

"So you'll not think me a complete cad—"

"A belated wish."

"—any position for preference or prohibition?"

"None," she says. Given his motionless, she arrays herself on the pillows. His eyes follow her. He licks his lips, and for a fragile moment looks uncertain when she spreads her legs. "Some intuition, if not a womanly one, assures me you have scripted this play already with yourself the leading role."

He grimaces at that, and at last stands to remove his leather. His cock pokes him in the stomach when he sits to remove pants and shoes together, for he failed to remove the latter before the former. She is glad to see his lust is more than bluff. It is elegantly long, his cock.

"Fortunate that I have a role custom written for a Viera." He gestures aimlessly downward. "Will you—?"

"Not fresh out of hunting leathers."

"Then," he rallies, valiant, "if you could face a pillow of your choice—"

Fran settles on her elbows, sinks her heels into the cushions, and tilts her hips. He regards the spread of her thighs with an unreadable expression. His lips glisten.

"If you would take me as a boy, then you will take me facing forward. I am no virgin on which you think to find only your own pleasure."

Balthier licks his fingertips; she angles to meet him. He strokes to begin with, almost lovingly, along fold and crease. For a single blissful moment his thumb sparks her pleasure. He stops to spit on his fingers, his other hand this time, and works her open without any warmth. He measures her depth, hesitant to begin, then long fingers feeling deep enough to make her wince. His cock twitches at that.

"Bite something," he suggests, as he lowers his weight to her, "the curtain doesn't exactly shut out sound."

"Think you truly enough to have me cry out?"

His eyebrow quirks. His weight on one hand, his other guides him home for the angle's awkwardness. When he broaches her he does it slowly and closes his eyes. Fran watches his expression turn to liquid lust -- but for all that, guarded.

He seeks no pleasure in this but for the distant end, and his pace considers only that. His hand flattens her right breast as an afterthought for its presence, his drugged breath wet in her ear, his cock striking hilt-deep in her arse with a force to make her thighs and stomach ripple. At some point the effort has him lean back to strip off his shirt. She looks at the flex of his biceps, the old scars across his shoulders from the rub of Archadian plate armor, the strength in his marksman's forearms. She angles herself to meet his thrusts for her own pleasure, for he will not consider it. Once or twice she thinks to meets his eyes, but his gaze looks through her.

She comes silently. His too-deep strokes after irritate her, but she does not speak. He is close enough she can feel each throb thickening him, and she is tight enough that she feels the spasm when he finds his completion. When he withdraws he checks himself conspicuously, palming his foreskin back and forth before wiping the wet off on a pillowcase. A thought begins to curl, with something of delight, that she knows and many surely cannot; he is certainly bluffing his reputation, at least in this area. She could well believe his boys nearly always left his bed with little more than the preliminaries done.

He sits, and naked, looks awkward as he does not in clothing. His limbs are too long, his skin too pale, his chest, legs, arms, all too hairy. He pours another glass of water and drinks it before attending to her own thirst.

"That was easier than I thought," he mutters, quiet, without considering perhaps the greater perception at her command.

When Fran sits up her hair fills her periphery with silver. "What were you expecting? Teeth, or a trap?"

"Oh." He starts as though he had forgotten her presence. He gives her an expression she could almost call a smile. "Ah, well, teeth or a trap, so to speak. Recriminations, tears, accusations, demands for promises, poetry, spouting love and lust; some kind of star-filled sky to descend about the pair of us to bless the union with astral benediction; at the very least: a demand for kisses." He shrugs, the muscle shifting under the pale skin of his shoulder. "The usual fare."

Fran collects her garb from where she dropped it, along crook of elbow. His sweat-smell is along her skin, and she itches from the leaf. Thus she grabs him, making an effort with her claws to cage his ears and cheeks, and kisses him, hard and violent.

"You need only ask." The hiss in her voice surprises her, again. She releases him with force, left with the taste, of smoke, sourness. The twist on his lips is practiced.

"Listen." A grin up at her ears. "If you can do otherwise, that is. You and I, we did well this hunt, together. I've nearly enough to get my ship out of grubby Moogle paws, and you can join me. You don't complain, or try to tell me what to do, and you know your way around an engine bay as well as with your bow. I know you need the money, you're living like a runaway. Come fly with me."

"After that performance I have no desire to have you warm my bed."

"I know _that_. This was, well, an experiment of sorts, I wanted to – to see – Likewise you inspire in me no desire, particularly no desire to sell all my freedoms to make you happy. In fact, I find your arrogance and disdain quite insulting, if somewhat refreshing. I doubt this will happen between us again."

"Flatterer. I require a salary."

"A wage, and only per trip. I'm no lordling to keep a servant on retainer. The rate a third class engineer demands for a flight, and a twenty percent share of hunt dividends."

"In addition, a twenty percent share of the proceeds from loot. Also, first claim of weaponry."

"All right," Balthier adds, "we don't have the same preference in arms, at least. I'm content."

For a long moment Fran regards his hand before she remembers to take it, to shake on the deal. There is something in that: this is the first time Balthier has offered her honesty in his touch.

"Balthier." She shifts her weight. She is not sore, but too aware of his prick's path through her own flesh, his spend. "If you _should_ want this to occur again—"

"Ah. Already reconsidering?"

She gives up.

.

A year teaches Fran more about Balthier than she cared to know.

He knows more of mechanical engineering than his age should allow, but falters when it comes to practice rather than theory. He orders his life, his hair, his wardrobe all with a military precision, a discipline lost when they must be grounded. His skill with the gun is supplemented by his sword, but his preference is ever for the former than the latter. His knowledge and application of alchemy nears that of a scientist's lifetime of lore.

Balthier's competence stops surprising Fran, yet she never feels quite prepared to witness the inverse. For all that he knows there is much that he does not.

The strangest thing Fran learns of Balthier is that he cannot tolerate silence.

He never listens except to agreement, but if she offers that it startles him to new heights of sarcasm. Fran learns to keep her own silence close; Balthier talks to someone not there. He makes noise that strives to fill the ship's great metal hollowness. He hitches his stride so his pistol slaps against his thigh or battle-gun across his back; he stretches his legs so his leather creaks; he tosses his head to set his jewelry to jingling; his knuckles and joints he cracks, rhythmic and repeatedly.

She wonders if his complete disdain for others comes from his own skyward standards. He gives himself no idle time a-flight, instead studying, learning, improving. Every text he devours with a bottomless hunger, obscene in his swiftness. He fills his mind as though he wants to crowd out existing knowledge within. Viera do not read for leisure or learning: the words of others are corruption, yet Balthier argues with long-dead authors loud enough that Fran cannot avoid listening.

When rhetoric fails him, he sings. He does not have to be stoned or otherwise intoxicated to do so. They are not songs Fran has ever heard, and she had thought to have heard them all.

"—when I was a blonde I walked as a blonde I talked as a blonde but now I that I have become brunette; farewell, blonding lotion, farewell, hairless chest; hello, to this wasteland of depilatory wax, and welcome to this brave terrain—"

As Balthier notes, grinning at Fran's ears, her form well defines her function. Listening is in Fran's nature: yet had his tenor been any less pleasing she would have left long ago.

Yet whatever the endless facts and endless repoitoire he holds in his recall, Balthier cannot or does not remember names or faces. Everyone he knows he titles instead by what evident role they display in their garb: doctor, mechanic, dear, love, merchant, lady, lad, barkeep, you, hey you. Everyone he dislikes he appends with insult instead: pillow-face, dog-botherer, shirt-lifter, face-fucker. It is especially intriguing the depravity of titling he concocts for those he beds. Those names he shares, gleeful, with Fran over their morning coffee, the numbers almost to match the nights they must spend grounded. Mostly boys, on rare occasion a woman, it is as though he detests that sex must involve any person other than himself: and again, she considers and considers and decides he truly beds less than one in seven of those who cross his threshold.

On occasion Balthier calls her Fran. It never ceases to startle her.

.

The sound wakes Fran before she knows why, and she thinks, Balthier never laughs when he flirts.

There are multiple conflicts that bewilder her: she cannot determine where she is, what time it is, anything but that she is somewhere close to Balthier and there is something wrong. She staggers against the Whitecap's wall, lost for the dark of the moon. The feel of the plastered wood grants her familiarity. They are aground, yes, in rooms with proper beds and not that narrow hall in which they camp on the Strahl. They have been flying for straight weeks now that she can even make that mistake, for Balthier never brings his bedplay to the Strahl. In the sky he is a different kind of man to what he is aground.

He laughs again, the sound distorted through the wall. Awake, she hears it for what it is, and it is not a sound of mirth. She remembers to wrap the room's itchy towel about her nakedness before she leaves, and at his door does not knock for permission.

Fran disdains to fumble at the bureau to find the candle, the lighter. She holds her hand up instead and whispers myst to light. Balthier does not stir from where he curls, shirtless, about his pillow, his lips also curled about the shape of whispered words. His shoulders are to the corner that he faces the whole of the room as though expecting attack. Another nightmare. He sometimes chooses not see her when he is like this.

"Balthier," she tries, "are you well?"

"—here lies in solemn state one garlanded in gin; he feted Fate and changed her frown into an upward grin—"

"Where is your lover? Are you harmed?"

"No lover tonight. Closing ranks." He speaks across the toneless thread of his song, his voice flat. "They were uninterested in the lord's bastard son, in the king's unacknowledged heir, in the latest leading man, in the dashing young pirate. No matter, they were all ugly anyway. I would have had to bag them before I could have dared."

"A new audience may appreciate the performance more."

"Any performance risks growing stale, when overdone," he agrees, distantly. "Someone as old as you would have seen it all, I suppose. Perhaps that is why I like you."

Fran settles on the edge of his bed. He flinches when the mattress sinks under her weight. She does not know what to believe, the resistance of his shoulders or the shining ache of his eyes.

"It would be arrogance to presume I had seen everything there was to be seen. Such is the reason why I live in the world instead of the Wood." She does not presume to touch him. "Why did you leave your home?"

"Oh, yes, come upon me in a vulnerable state and think to worm every tormented tale out of me." He glares then, through the sheen of tears unshed. "What performance do you think to try on this captive audience, my dearest: mother or wife?"

"Neither. My concern is solely for that we are scheduled to fly on the morrow and that you pilot poorly enough even with full rest. Will you not accept the concern of a colleague?"

"Mother or wife," Balthier sings, as though she has not spoken, "both for life and endless strife." He moves to settle himself, his legs stretching beneath the light sheet to push his feet against her thigh. "Here is a song for you: She loves him but will not allow him out, the streets are full of nasty fights and men - she whispers and sits him on that porcelain pot; his eyes grow round, his bowels will knot, he strains to be the best of boys not knowing then the years of training it takes to bring about—she loves him, oh, that frightening fact sinks in—"

"I cannot understand your fear, and for our proximity I wish to do so."

"Do you know you're the only woman– the only adult female that's been in my life for longer than a night? Apart from some old battleax in the Akademy, but oh, I could hardly call her a woman."

"No mother birthed the king's son, then. No wife mourns the pirate's errant ways."

"Mother died. After I claimed eight months in her comfort. I killed her, you know: my first murder counts from before I'd even tasted the breath of freedom. My brothers never let me forget that. Strange, considering I can't remember it."

"It is not an uncommon occurrence. There are few enough checks on your population as it is, and marriage seems an imperfect solution."

"I do agree, though no one else in Archades would agree with us. Courtly ways, all that rot; unmarried at sixteen and suddenly a social pariah. Even Vayne set me up to fall, after he – and I. Allegiances and alliances, he told me, some damned excuse for his own cock-headed will, for he would never marry. All I saw was a cage for other people wrought of my own imprisonment. What was I supposed to do when prodded to that cage but bite and run? The costume for that role would have become my flesh; a classless doublet to hide my gut and gout and gods know what else. Much better to grab at gonorrhea with one hand and glory with the other."

"Fortunate that you found the vehicle to flee such entrapment where those they would have wed to you cannot. Yet I cannot pity those girls deprived of your husbandry. Fate's fortune they did not end chained to you."

"They would have loved me whatever I named them," Balthier scoffs. His eyes water. "They always do."

Fran rubs at her own eyes, her nose. She does not know whether to believe her ears or her eyes, her eyes or her nose. How many people reside in Balthier's one flesh?

"Your opinion of yourself is unassailable."

"As well it should be, with everything striving to bring me to my knees. Bait and catch in one tight virgin package, my love: everyone wanted me. Everyone loved me, at the Akademy, even the instructors, especially the instructors. A prodigy with projectiles, proficient with physics, and let us not forget my perfect posterior. I had this – what would you call it, a clique? People, gaggling giggling gagging girls, students, other bored noble sons and even half the population of Old Archades replete with pot and – oh, such performances I used to put on for them. They loved me so much. My house, my home, such parties I had, every room full and not a single friend amongst them that at the last they all laughed and laughed when my vanity bent me to break—"

"Balthier—"

"No, it wasn't Balthier. Balthier had none of that, has nothing, and wants nothing. Except the Strahl." He laughs then, and chokes; the sound is one of tears. The mystglow casts him in unhealthy shades, but she cannot see a shine on his cheeks. "Oh, gods, Fran, we're not flying tomorrow and I can't run if I can't fly."

Fran lets her hand come to rest on his ankle. He stirs at the touch, and does not pull away. "We must fly. My wage is three months in arrears."

"Three? My accounts, perhaps one…"

"Three. My apportion of the loot you have spent thus far on the Strahl's maintenance, yet I am owed that also—"

"Fucking Moogles are refusing to service her," Balthier snaps, "without a third deposit up front, and she cannot fly again without them we ran her so ragged these months. No, I ran her ragged: I must face up to that responsibility at the least, for the ship is mine, and I am hers. I should have told you earlier, but – gah, grounded by empty pockets. Quite a contradiction that nothingness should weigh on me so heavily. I have nothing to pay them with but promises, and my word is worthless."

"Perhaps you should try your aforementioned perfect posterior."

"I suspect the fur-fucks aren't tremendously interested in that." He starts, and looks at her, sharp. "Your posterior, on the other hand, is decidedly furrier than mine—"

Fran feels her ears flick, agitated for her inability to read whether he jests or not. "You mistake our friendship if you think I will whore myself for your ship."

"Always thinking the worst of me, my dear. My intent was that you should talk to them. Please, Fran. They – I – I've been such a bastard to them for being so gil-grabby, I half think they're being stubborn solely to see me scowl. You could talk to them on their level—"

"I will talk to them for the sake of my wages in arrears, and not for your need. Be aware henceforth that the level difference between a Moogle and a Viera sets one knee-high to the other."

"Thank you."

Balthier says that as grudgingly as though the words are his own gil, yet the crooked smile that follows is as free as the air.

.

"The reason, kuu," the Moogle says, near inarticulate with rage, "is that the Hume bastard kupop customized every damned item in the entire airship, and that there is no such thing as a replacement piece! Nothing fits! Kupo! Do you know, stretch-legs, how much labor costs these days? This isn't a charity service for wordy Archadian runaways!"

"The Strahl is clearly a prototype," Fran replies. "I have worked on her in-flight maintenance. There is no impossible complexity as to the Strahl to thus explain why you must deconstruct every piece before you can enact repairs."

"Kupo!" the Moogle shrieks, "do you know how much money he owes us?"

Fran does not meet the Moogle's glower. The hangar is full of motion, Moogles running back and forth in their hierarchical clusters of five or eight. None of the other mechanics meet her gaze, so she listens instead. Sniggers, shuffles, a few curt shushes. Fran had not expected the sight of the Strahl's engine, the bay opened, all service ducts stripped, contents unbolted and laid across the hanger floor, should disturb her so. With her wings folded back, her bulk is halved; the poor ship looks gutted, an empty carcass crawling with vermin.

"All I can consider," Fran says, "is that perhaps you are removing every piece, deconstructing it, building duplicates for your own profitable sales in airship customization, and only when you are satisfied, completing the service on the Strahl. And, subsequently, charging Balthier for all that labor, at least eighty percent of which is committed solely for your own profit."

Fran does not need an answer. The entire shed falls silent, but for the resonant clang of a dropped spanner.

"Ah," says the Moogle, hesitant, and flexes his claws nervously, "ah, ah, ah, solidarity, sister, and a sm-small cut of the earnings?"

"I am no sister of yours, Moogle, that you cripple my partner's ship for your own satisfaction."

"Your partner?" The Moogle attempts to look sly. "Hardly your partner, Fran, when he only gives you such a small portion of what he hauls – and what do you care what we charge him anyway, the ship's not yours."

"We must fly," Fran says, "I will overlook your considerable breach of the rights of property both physical and intellectual; the Strahl must be ready for flight by dusk, and Balthier will not pay for this service. Pull your fee out of your profits, or your posterior, if you must."

"F-sh-pff--So –soon? Impossible, kuu, we haven't even serviced the hydraulics. Your wings will stick."

"Balthier may well kill you if he cannot fly. The Hume is unstable, and unfond of the non-Hume races." Honesty will not let her keep silent. "Of anyone."

The Moogle looks incredulous. "Are you threatening me, Hume-hole?"

"Emphasising the importance of your compliance," Fran hesitates, yet Balthier has said it often enough. "Fur-fuck."

"Ha! It's still impossible. There's not enough workers for that timeframe, and we're still feeling our way about the ship. Needless complexity in the design and all for the sake of it, to be honest. A bad egg, especially with the way Balthier flies it."

"We will assist," Fran says, "Balthier and myself."

"That despotic dreamer, greasing his fingers in my workshop? I don't think so, kuu."

"We will return in an hour. My word that I'll not reveal your theft for that it will never occur again, and that we will fly tonight."

"Tomorrow morning," the Moogle says, sour. "Tomorrow morning, at the least."

Fran nods her acquiescence. As she departs the hanger to Balfonheim's salted dawn air, the noise of the workshop commences again, thrice as loud as though to make up for that brief, disturbing lack.

.

On her return to the Whitecap, she finds Balthier reluctant to rise for his lack of sleep the night before. He dresses without his usual regard, in a collarless shirt and the loose trousers he sleeps in on the Strahl. He does not shave nor don his jewelry. Startlingly, as they make their way to the hanger he sets her to conversation with a pastry vendor with a curt, 'distract him, bare your bosom if you must.' As she watches over the vendor's shoulder, Balthier loads his pockets and sleeves to make a nonchalant retreat down a nearby crowded alley, complete with breakfast.

"—and lunch," he clarifies against her complaint, as though such a thing makes it all well. She is hungry, though, and eats the fruitbread he offered her as he contemplates his own haul. "Anyone stupid enough to be stolen from deserves the theft."

"And this applies to you?"

Flush with success and crumbs, Balthier ignores her. "That stallkeeper might now learn a lesson about the cost of cleavage. Nothing's free in this world, Fran; not for you, and never I."

Fran watches him eat. "For how long have you not had the gil for food?"

Balthier swallows, the knot of his throat stark against his skin, and unsurprisingly again ignores her. "What I want to know is how you convinced the Moogles to void the service fee. Will I return one day and find myself in greater debt for promises I didn't make?"

"Our labor will cut costs considerably, and they had not started work. The rest the Moogle offers out of goodwill."

Balthier laughs, to choke. He stops walking to swallow. "Moogles offer nothing out of goodwill. So, I'm curious, Fran: how does one blow a Moogle? I heard they were barbed."

Fran surrenders. Silence only works around Balthier for so long. "Backwards-barbed and double-boned, that once they mount their females any form of retreat is impossible. That is why there are so few Moogle females: as thinking creatures they are unfond of the painful advances of their male brothers, and retreat to form their own societies."

"In truth?"

"Not at all."

"I knew it."

The press of the morning crowd sets them to keep pace shoulder to shoulder. With a thoughtful expression, Balthier offers her a second sugared bun from the bell of his sleeve. Fran takes it, and he pushes back his sleeve to lick the icing trace from his forearm.

"So for how long have you not had the gil for food, Fran?"

"When I get hungry, I hunt. Unlike your own Hume-tailored tastes, food is of no concern to me."

"Perhaps I should start living like a vagrant."

"You already do."

.

The Moogle regards them with a pinched expression when they reach the hangar. The numbers of workers Fran espied previously are reduced, that he directs but two clusters of five to their direction.

"Quickly, mind," he barks at Balthier as he races past, not stopping for fear of what conversation might reveal. "I want that monstrosity out of here by tonight, it's taking up precious space. Tomorrow morning at the latest."

Balthier, it seems, can barely speak for the state of his ship. It is too much to hope that his silence can last.

"What have you – you – gutted her, you bestial little bit of fur! I put her in for bodywork repairs, a timing fault and wear on the hydraulics and you gut her engine bay? Are you insane?"

"Ahem," says one of the ten workers, stepping forward, "if I may speak –"

"Oh, please do," Balthier snarls, "your master's lost his sense somewhere amidst the entire dismantled display of my engine."

"—the configuration of the Strahl prohibits ease of access for even minor faults," the Moogle says, his eyes on the floor. "Even for the size of a Moogle, we can't get into the heart of the ship's services to do something as simple as draining the sump. There's a lot of interesting things about this ship, especially the operational efficiencies of the actual engine, and not to mention the innovation of the glossair configuration paired with those unfolding wings, but the way it was put together is frustrating, to say the least. Um, yeah. Kupo?"

"Who are you? The first of your five? What's your name?"

The Moogle who spoke shifts his weight, uneasily. Every other Moogle of that tight circle is staring at him. For a moment Fran feels pity; Moogle brotherly hierarchy is less forgiving than even an Archadian court.

"I'm," the Moogle stutters, "the fifth, sir, my first's name is Renne—"

"Your name," Balthier repeats.

"Nono."

"Nono. I'll try to remember it. I'm your first, Fran's my second, and you're the third for as long as I'm here. Order everyone else however you will under you. Understand?"

Nono's ears flick back, flattened; there is a stir as the other nine Moogles do something similar, distressed. Fran almost speaks. Balthier cannot simply re-structure an entire cultural institution on the basis of a whim.

"Understood, Balthier," Nono says. "What shall we do first?"

Balthier is regarding the ship with an expression Fran hasn't seen on him before, most quixotic. After a moment of consideration he slides his hands into his pockets, distracted, and starts. Their pastries, Fran supposes; Balthier sets his fists on his hips instead, dislikes the posture, and crosses his arms.

"If we were to reconfigure the internal layout for efficiency to match that of the operational savings, seeing as the engine's out and we have a hoist, how long would that take?"

"A month." Nono scratches between his ears, considering. "But the boss won't like that, for cost as well. We'll have to engineer every mount again."

Nono is not hesitant enough for the fifth of a group of brothers, Fran observes, and he does not refer to that Moogle exclamation often enough to be so low in the hierarchy. His fur has a different lay to that of the other nine that surround him with sullen expression. A non-blood relation then, Fran realizes; low simply because of his lack of established presence.

"Fuck your boss," Balthier says, "if he's been doing this to my engine every time he owes me at least three months of my life back. I want to do this right."

"A suggestion, then?" Nono says, and then appends that confidence with hesitance. "If I may?"

"If I wanted deference I would have stayed in Archades. Follow Fran's lead, speak up or shut up."

"Take the optimals out of this; myst converter, motor, glossair navigational device, weaponry. The chassis holds its own with minor amendments. Then lift the whole of another ship's heart into this and append your own customizations into that. Dual efficiencies, less wastage later."

"Timeframe?"

"A fortnight."

"Done," Balthier says. "And now Fran can go work her charm on your boss's barbed reputation again."

Nono's brow furrows. "Barbed?"

"This will cost you, Balthier, and you cannot afford such a thing." Fran uncrosses her own arms, steps into that circle. "I negotiated none of this."

"Labor and shed time at the least," Nono says, "then parts."

"Everything costs, Fran." Balthier shrugs. "The question is whether the cost equates to the worth, and where the Strahl is concerned, it always does."

Fran meets Balthier's eyes. Quixotic at the least, or wistful, and she still cannot name the colour. In the shade it is the dark flecks that stand stark against the green, the gold nearly invisible. For a moment the dichotomy falls from Balthier, and his expression matches what she reads in his eyes; a strange, buoyant challenge.

Nono answers when Fran asks where his boss would be. She follows his directions to a flight of stairs that lead to the mechanics' study. Each riser is too shallow for her height, tailored for the comfort of Moogles, not for Viera, and Fran wonders why she notes such a thing when all the world has always felt like an illfitting shell.

.

Before three days have passed, the resentfulness of the Moogle boss bends to the force of Balthier's enthusiasm. He has his full staff stop their alternate tasks to attend the Strahl's state of disarray.

There is this: Balthier wins people even when he would seek to antagonize them. He does not moderate his language; he swears at Moogle and unthinking tool alike. Regardless of his profanity Fran watches as the rest of the Moogle shed turns to him. They are swayed by him, corrupted by his thought. He thinks enough like a Moogle that they can find familiarity in him regardless of his height. He prioritizes efficiencies in a layered hierarchy, and sketches process on paper before he thinks to set his hand to a task. The Moogles are enraptured; Fran has never seen Balthier move with as much focus before, even when on the prowl. He is that moment, a frozen potential, his own stilled heartbeat and held breath that comes before he fires his unerring shot.

Either that, or the Moogles are simply fascinated by the Strahl herself. The ship is a cluster of contradictions that every solution to one issue creates a chain of new problems, and Moogles live for such complexity.

"—a lemon," Fran overhears Nono. She is unseen, below the ship in a sling, cold oil on her fingers, and he and Balthier hang from the side in the bay itself. "What I mean—"

"I'm familiar with the terminology," Balthier replies, dry. "I paid for this ship, Moogle, flesh and blood and tears I paid for this ship. I'm still paying for it. More money than the most brazen mistress would demand."

"It's got good bones," Nono says, mollifying, "a beautiful body, and the potential, but kupo, whoever engineered the prototype rushed it where it shouldn't have been rushed. Small wonder there's so many problems."

"The Strahl was half done when the Emperor commissioned Bahamut. Dr Cid directed Draklor to abandon the Strahl in favor of that greater project. Call it a rare display of my histrionic side, but I felt sorry for the thing so loved and so suddenly abandoned."

"You know it would have been cheaper to gut this for parts and buy another ship? A smaller one, that you could pilot on your own."

There is silence for a long time. Fran can scarcely smell them over the greasy metal, the current of myst, but she can hear their harnesses still creaking with their weight.

"I made my choice," Balthier says, "this ship, this life, lemon or no. Even if she is a cumbersome, bloated, unresponsive gil-grabbing bitch, what sort of a man would I be to abandon my first lady of liberty?"

"A bastard," Nono laughs, "but no more a one than I already hear."

"Ah, wishful thinking, that. Bastardry would be a curse most welcomed. Ow."

"Did it spark?"

"Do you particularly want to smell the scorch of my fingers?"

"In that case the current's working as it should. Care for some lunch, ever-hungry Hume?"

"Assuredly," Balthier replies, "as you're paying, my moneyed Moogle friend. My money, I will reiterate, so kindly avert the protestation that you paid last time."

.

There comes the day when there is nothing else that can be done. Another week of work, Nono suggests, but the Strahl is flight-ready and Balthier's temper is nearly broken by the weight of the earth.

Dusk on the horizon, they shut off the lights and lock up the hanger, having been trusted with the keys for a few days now. Balthier has in his pocket the lengthy list of charges, and has refused to show them to Fran. His current mood is strange, and dangerous; elated, angry, all at once. His limbs are loose as he walks. That gives an arrogant slouch to his shoulders. Fran does not want to drink with him tonight.

"Shall we to a den?"

"Haven't the gil," he replies. "Much easier to get a lass to buy me a shot than a smoke. And for you also, I imagine. Flash some tit and have a sailor's salubriousness lubricate your own throat."

"I think—" Fran hesitates. He walks a few steps ahead of her before he realizes she has stopped, and turns. His face is shadowed, that she can only read the cockiness of his stance. "I shall abstain. If you wish to intoxicate yourself thoroughly I can pilot on the morrow, for we must be gone by dawn."

"You think I'd let you fly my ship out of port?"

"You have done before."

"I've let you fly but _only_ once our course is set. Never into or out of port." He tries to smooth the anger out of his voice with small success. "Come for a drink, Fran, a single drink. We'll not be back in a city for some time; I intend to stay out until I have enough to pay this lot back. And pay you back, of course. Never let it be said I owed a woman for anything."

Such illogic: whatever level of debt he has accrued he cannot think to pay it back with a single trip. He has no supplies, only his old weaponry, no curatives or stores put aside for such a thing. He has not even the preservatives necessary to stock the fleshy kind of cargo that fetches the greatest returns at the marketplace.

Yet she acquiesces, despite herself, for argument would involve too much conversation. Every conversation risks contamination.

Her speculation as to his want prove unfounded, for within a matter of moments Balthier loses himself in the Whitecap's crowd, cheerful enough she cannot determine if it is merely another performance. Fran finds herself a seat by a quiet spot at the bar and waits. She cannot stir herself to speak or reject those that approach her, that the barkeep takes some pity on her and gives her a drink as well as a wink. It is clear, strong, and spiced with lemon and cinnamon. She sees Balthier once, when he leaps onto a table to sing the crowd to stir, an old song this time with a harmonic that has her shiver—

"—I am a free shadow, no owner for me; no man to fetch and carry for, no body to bend in the gutter for, to shrivel all my length at noon and lengthen to my longest at dusk; I will not point out west, no, nor angle to the east; after moonrise I am free, free, free, only to see, nothing is there to hold me close—"

It is after midnight when she sights him again, his arm draped about the shoulders of a woman twice his age and only half his height. He bends to whisper in the woman's ear, grinning; over the crown of her head he meets Fran's eyes. His gaze looks through her, dull despite that smile, and the pair retreat up the stairs to a room.

Fran waits. A waitress gives her another drink and an especially hopeful smile, and lets her fingers linger on Fran's. This drink is pink and with too much fruit. Biting into each piece releases the taste of ferment, stronger than the drink itself, that it lingers at the back of Fran's throat too long. When she hears the shout, the rising voices, only then does she admit that she had been waiting for such.

The tavern's enthusiasm does not stop for the sound. Into that morass of noise Balthier's shout is swallowed. It is only Fran, keyed for it, that hears. She slides from her stool and makes her way to the tavern's back alley by the bathhouse exit. This is where Balthier dismisses his lovers, but he has no rights to the Whitecap's sanctuary tonight. He has only the Strahl.

Fran hears them before she sees them, the clatter of weight on wooden stairs, the stumble and smack of drunken flesh against too-narrow walls.

For someone so short, the woman possesses considerable force, to have manhandled Balthier, half-clad and staggering, so far. When she shoves, he barely catches himself from falling down those last few stairs, one arm burdened by his shirt, his vest, his shoes. He spins when he steps onto the alley's slick stone to face back up the stairs. The set of his shoulders under that scarce moonlight is careless, an unbending defense. "Oh, I should've listened -- That's what I get for giving you the benefit of doubt. Wasting my time, you little--!"

She throws, then – a bottle. Liquid flies, scatters, covering the stink of the alley with sharp, strong whiskey. Balthier barely ducks in time, to flinch when the bottle shatters on the wall behind him.

"Little?" he objects, faintly, and straightens. "My dear, you can't talk to me about 'little' when it's your own lack of feminine cleavage that so confounded my approach."

Fran steps between when the woman, fists raised, would descend to the alley. At that the imprecations stop. The woman's face is shadowed that Fran cannot determine how much of this anger will linger past the morrow's hangover. Fran smells Balthier where he stands behind her, the extent of his frustrated lust, the heat rising from his shirtlessness.

"Leave. We will also."

"Don't think I'm not going to tell everyone," the woman rallies.

"Tell them what?" Fran says, but the woman is already halfway up the stairs, the Whitecap's door swinging from her slam. "What they already know?"

Balthier measures his length against Fran's back, and there is something in their matched heights. His arms are about her waist. Fran cannot startle for that touch; he touches so rarely that to push him away would be an insult he would not forget. "I'm not entirely a reprobate. Just careful. Just," he laughs a brittle laugh, "not tonight. So much for assuming age means a wide," he presses his grin into her shoulder, "range of experience."

"I know what you are, Balthier."

His hands wander. Her own shoulders are left bare for the cut of her corsetry, so she feels the fur of his chest against her. His breath spills at her neck, warm and wet that she smells the whiskey, but he does not move to kiss her. Both his hands now cup her breasts from below.

"I could not ever mistake you for a man, whatever the dark or light of the room. Such an interesting development of evolution, this form. Did that Archadian scholar ever discover some provincial shrine somewhere where I can burn a stick and scatter holy rice in thanks?"

He is hard against her arse, and leans so Fran must step, one foot in front of the other, to hold his weight still upright. She takes his right hand and lifts it, places it at her collarbone. His nails are still greased from his work on the Strahl, but his skin is dry. He slides to dip his fingers into her bodice and finds a nipple.

"Oh," he says, testing that erection as he grinds his own, "you really want it."

"Yes," she says, and wonders.

"Earlier. When you asked if I wanted to go to a den where we last – where we first – did you want it, to suggest such a thing?"

"Yes."

His fingers pause, that she regrets her words. "No one's ever wanted me before."

"Everyone wants you."

"No, no, they want – what, some role, or what I can do for them. Errant pirate, bastard son of an Archadian prince, rot and roleplay. You, you know I can't even afford to pay you. You've seen – when I can't – when I'm sleeping – I want to taste you properly, Fran."

"We have beds on the Strahl."

"Here."

Balthier can hold her weight. It surprises her, for she is still taller than he and he is lean. Hume males have a strange musculature though, that they can do more than it seems they should be able to. With her shoulders against the wall, he goes down on one knee and lifts. His hands are hard on her thighs, her thighs on his own shoulders. She forgets the force of that touch, for he noses aside the crotch of her underwear and licks, seeking. He dips, tongue sliding into her depth, sourcing her shallowness. He finds her for but an instant before he stops.

"Not that different. You taste – more. You're very wet."

"What were you expecting?"

"Well. Honestly, a hidden cock. A hermaphroditic race, or something like that."

"I do not have a cock, Balthier, hidden or otherwise."

"Of course you don't. That's why you want mine."

There is an insult in those words: that she would not find completion without it, without him. Fran cannot summon the thought to argue. Such argument would be suspect regardless. She is not complete; no Viera in the world and without Word can be so.

Balthier bends to taste her again. That is precisely what he does, for he is not applying his tongue to her pleasure, nor tantalizing in promise of more. He tastes her, and that is all. The thought occurs to Fran that he has not, perhaps, ever applied himself so before, not for so long.

"Are you quite sated?"

"Hardly," he says, "but quite hard, if you must know."

"The Strahl, Balthier. The beds. Whatever the youth of your knees, I am past wanting to explore the rear alleys of taverns."

"Oh," he says, as he lets her stand, "you want it, I can taste it."

He puts on his shirt with a disgruntled air to leave it open and untucked. He sings something nonsensical as they walk –

"—once I watched a rabbit hop into my room and there she stayed! For she grew too much until her ears – you've seen her ears? – the tips they would have touched the doorframe's arch! And, oh, I've never, ever, never, seen a rabbit care to bend—"

—that she knows he cannot contemplate a thing to say. At one point he stops and pulls a silver hair from his mouth, and regards it speechless in the moonlight.

"Unless you intend to frame a souvenir—"

"Are all women as hairy as you?" He pauses. "As furry?"

"Are all Humes as hairy as you?"

"Point taken."

Balthier will not let her turn on the lights, neither in the hanger's great expanse or once into the Strahl's heart. Light comes regardless. The moon is full, and silver spills through the strip of skylight in the hangar's roof. Inside the Strahl Balthier has always let her take the bunk next to the long strip of window for his own half-acknowledged fear of waking and thinking he falls. As she sheds her garb to lay back on that bunk, the moon does not permit them privacy. Light slashes inwards to turn his skin to marble.

In the moonlight he regards the spread of her legs for so long that she hisses a frustration through her teeth. At that he deigns to touch, examining the effect of where he lingers with clinical quiet. By the time he finds her lust, her thought is distorted beyond reason.

"—oh, look, it moves."

"Again," she says, "there, again."

"Not in?"

"Or in, if you want it in. In, or there, there you have it, just now, Balthier."

He sinks to put his tongue to her, better, now that he knows where she wants. He slides a long finger inside with too much ease for the excess of her lust. He speaks and pulls back only the extent necessary to articulate. His tongue always finds her swiftly again.

"Is that any good?"

"Quite different to your cock."

"—what is that?"

The motion inside her teases, taunts. "The closed mouth of my womb. You would not feel that with your cock."

"And that?"

"Bone of pelvis, on which to hook your cock."

"To hook what how?"

"When the Hume at last deigns to enter, the head of his cock will catch behind the hook of bone, and thus that is triggered to close firmly, that the Hume cannot retreat until all viera lust is sated," she takes a breath, "but such demonstration would require your cock."

His finger pauses. She meets his eyes across the expanse of her stomach. He is grinning, wet-lipped.

"Do you want something of mine, my dear?"

"Balthier—"

"Not yet. Not yet."

Balthier closes his eyes when he tends her. It is the longest time she has ever heard his silence span. Fran reaches to turn his wrist so the curve of his finger angles upwards, to stir that itch she cannot reach herself. His breath spills around his effort, hot and wet on her thigh. His rhythm is better than anticipated, unconsciously competent. When she comes it is drenching for his relentlessness. She feels herself clench about him, the crook of his finger, for as long as he continues to tongue her. She must push him away.

There is wet beneath her arse, her come spread across the underside of her skirt. Balthier sits up to regard that with some surprise, his hair considerably awry. Fran had not even known her grip had descended to that crop, but when she sees him so she remembers the feel of his hair as she combed claws through: coarse, as though it would curl given any length. He weaves when he stands, and swallows a hiccup.

"I suppose you could consider that sufficient repayment for your mediation with the Moogles, what do you think?"

His cock is straining at his pants, bent for the constriction. Fran chooses to ignore his words and reaches for his flesh instead. That want she can read easier than his words. She arches her fingers back to present him only with palm and fingers. He steps out of reach of her claws regardless.

"I can do that myself. I don't need your help there."

They are on the ship. Fran had not considered the extent to which that short walk from Whitecap to Strahl would shift the path of his thought; that the sight of the ship, his liberty and his debt, would shift his desires so. There is no more, she supposes, that he can give, here.

"So then," she says, and wants to say _trust me_. "Do yourself."

He sits on his bunk, opposite, and worms out of his trousers. His fingers move slowly along his length, his expression vague in that half-shadow.

"—you'll call it even?"

"As you wish it. For solely the negotiations with the Moogles. I will not forfeit my wage for an incomplete lay."

With a brisk left-handed grip, Balthier spends in so few strokes that she wonders if his reluctance was for no greater complexity than his pride. He also manages to catch most of it in his palm, the rest on the long lines of his stomach, and rids himself of those leavings with a towel.

"Enjoy your wet bed." He rolls himself nude into his own. "Try not to wake me up if you decide to change the sheets. I have to pilot us out of dock tomorrow and I'd hate be anything less than precise."

.

On the morrow, her moonlit Balthier is ruined by the light of dawn.

Fran doubts it is the drink, for he had not smelled unreasonably drunk the night before. He meets her eyes with a twisted mocking, twisted lips, twisted gaze, that she does not see the usual split in him of youth vying against arrogance. He is all arrogance, and utterly disdainful. To apportion on himself a price, and to evaluate himself so low: Fran cannot wonder that he regards her with such bitterness, for she agreed with his valuation.

He takes them into the sky with a shaky hand. The Strahl's new-engineered responsiveness had him almost tip her. There is still grease beneath his nails, stubble along his jaw; the shirt he wears is rumpled, he is barefoot. His discipline has never been so lax upon his ship. Fran hears reproach in his silence when Balthier is never silent.

"I will not assume the blame for last night."

"I never said a word to blame you." He levels the ship with the horizon, and sets it to auto. He still refuses to look at her and instead goes to the map cupboard, hunting within. "Sex is sex, Fran, it's not trust or some mystical bond, it's simply fucking. I'm old enough to understand what nothingness means."

"Why do you do this to yourself?"

"It's not something I would recommend," he says into the closet, "but it is one way I've learned to keep living."

Fran rises, her heels resonant on the metal. He turns to look at her and startles. She had been seated by the time he made his way to the cockpit that morning; he has yet to assess the taunting minimalism of her new garb. His eyes linger. For a moment, he looks himself, wanting, and so young.

"Why do you do this to yourself?" he asks, husky. He cannot pull away his eyes. "Wife, mother, what now, whore? Must you pay such worship to your archetype?"

"I am Viera," Fran says, "yet displaced, 'Viera' is a meaningless definition. Viera are the Wood, and the Wood is the Viera: so what am I, but a Viera in the sky and thus not a Viera? Well, then, I shall do as I wish, as I want, for I will not be bound nor corrupted by the thought of what others would make me. The only word I hear is my own, and yours when you will talk. I am not your wife, your mother, your whore, regardless of whether you suck at my tit with lust, longing or love; I am no Archadian woman to depend on your willingness. I demand nothing from you but my wage. All else that passes between us, passes between us. Bring not your lengthy prejudice to my bed."

"Rest assured I will bring nothing to your bed," Balthier replies. "Thus I will not come to your bed, for nothing is a terrible courting gift to bring a woman."

Fran surprises herself with a growl. "That is not to my desires."

He rubs his hand along his jaw and startles at the sandpaper there. "I thought I was clear when I said I would never pander to another again. Will you take the helm? I forgot to shave."

"To where do we fly?"

The word comes as Balthier pauses within the doorway. He nods at the map he has laid on one of the spare seats. "Tchita."

"And through to Archades, oh prodigal son?"

"No." He calls it as he walks down the hall. "To _Tchita_. With your ears I would think you could hear the first time; yet I do, on occasion, forget your age."

Only when Balthier starts singing in the shower cubicle, an operatic vibrato today, does Fran allow herself some ease.

.

Fran does not know what directed Balthier to Tchita but for the proximity of the Phon's hunt camp for sales, for there is little of significant profit here.

It is not that there is no profit, but rather an inching one. A week of weapon-work, of camping back to back under the stars, of small significant words, returns them to Phon to unload all loot and goods in exchange for gil. That Balthier locks away on the Strahl, and will not inform her of his tally; they wander the Uplands again.

They are there for months in only each other's company. Balthier takes every hunt that appears within a proximity that does not require flight, for the Strahl has only enough power left to return to Balfonheim's safe port. Balthier's alchemy wrings curatives from the blood and bone of dying beasts that at the least they continue unharmed and well. His gun begins to misfire from excess use and the backblast of too many jammed shots, that he spends his nights by the campfire dismantling, filing, oiling, and at last surrendering the tired metal to the flame in exchange for his unloved sword.

Fran wonders that he dislikes that sword so much. It is clearly made for him, suits his height, and he is competent with it. He fights without his vest and rolls up his shirtsleeves. His every motion with the blade is heavily Archadian, expecting the defence of a full suit of plate.

"A Judge," he admits, at last, honing the edge from that blade as they sit by their cookfire. "I would have been a gunner but that my birth was too high to be a common grunt. Angled into officer class from the word of my acceptance, and trained with a sword. Officers fight with swords, you see, because then it's obvious they fight on the side of truth and justice. Sneaks fight with guns. I ended up bluffing through half the classes by pretending I was on a stage. I left before I would have needed to fight seriously."

"Was Archades truly so terrifying as to disturb your sleep?"

"Terrifying?" His laugh is a lie. "Tiresome, for all the courtly games we dreamed for the sake of amusement. Like slow cruel bondage, if you must know, or being flogged to death with lavender-scented lace ribbons. For things my grandfather said to someone's fourth cousin, I was liable—"

They both fall silent for the roar of a convey overhead. Balthier is on his feet, sword in his hand with a grace that looks natural in his thoughtlessness, his eyes wide.

"Archadian ships. Did you hear the resonance? Distinctly Archadian."

"They will be eradicating the encampment at Phon. Archades has ever disliked armed forces gathering in their proximity."

They must run then, Balthier with an easy lope but for the hunch of his shoulders and Fran with the familiarity of having spent her first free years in Ivalice having done the same. The Strahl is away from Phon, and she contemplates Balthier's foresight having sited it so. He does not allow them pause to hunt what prey in their path, though it would surely be hours before Archades spreads to circle the Uplands. There are flames back at Phon to stain the horizon dusky and raw.

When they take to the sky, they fly dark. Fran pilots. Balthier is in the depths of the engine, manually tuning the rings to the highest vibration and lowest speed possible that they can slide, dark and undetected through the circle of Archadian ships. When Balthier rejoins her he holds out his hand. Fran takes it, hears his wince, and finds the great gash across palm and fingers.

It is an expected wound for handling rings in motion. Fran does not know why she assumed Balthier would avoid the injury. She cannot use potion for the risk of metal shards embedded; instead she calls the great green for curatives, and fills the wound with myst's pressing demand.

Balthier arches against her grip. There is no need for their silence, but that without the ship's hum it seems quite strange to speak. The only light is from the stars and the console; Balthier's eyes are voids, his cheekbones stark, his nose too long in this light.

When his expression at last relaxes, Fran feels his hand to assure herself it is whole again.

The ocean's edge below is the only navigational point of consistency. The sky is too clouded, the moon absent. The land reflects a lightness constructed of textures of shadow as though it emits a day's worth of sunshine back as an inverse. The ocean itself is a void, a sinking nothingness.

They coast for near twenty minutes before the silence shatters.

"YPA-GB47, by rightful command of the Archadian Empire in whose skies you fly, you will land and prepare for boarding."

Balthier does not hesitate. His fingers touch the comm. "The Strahl will not comply with that order."

"YPA-GB47, you are an Archadian ship on Archadian territory, with ample Archadian artillery currently targeting your Archadian arse. You will land, and prepare for boarding."

"Are you deaf as well as damned? The Strahl will not comply with that order."

"Bunansa, bring that fucking ship down or we'll bring it down for you. You are targeted; you have four seconds to demonstrate compliance. One."

Fran scarcely has time to fasten her harness, a task always difficult for the length of her claw. She is cued only by Balthier's brisk strapping of his own harness. He is braced with expectation; when he touches the controls, she hears that secondary set of wings prime for deployment, still furled. Balthier reaches, and Fran startles -

—the ship falls.

And then, at last Fran understands why Balthier has earned both Balfonheim's mockery and respect for the way he flies. She is sure they will die. The dual wing deploys when she thinks it is too late, and Balthier somehow pulls them out of that fall so close to the ocean that she hears the spray surge in their wake, and she is still convinced they will die. Closing her eyes does not help; Fran stares then, wide-eyed, as stars and earth swap places as though caught in a spiraling dance. She hears when a flaw in the bodywork gives; feels the horrendous ripping shudder as one of the wings sheds its skin with the pressure. Balthier's knuckles are white on the controls, his jaw clenched. Fran sees the shock of that loss in the shake of his arms, the swiftness with which he strives for compensation for he cannot risk releasing the controls for long. The ship screams; they are upside down; far below them, something explodes.

Fran sees the Archadian ship then, a destroyer alone for the loss of the swifter pursuit in Balthier's plunge. The realization comes with a momentary amazement: she could only see the destroyer if Balthier were headed directly for them.

"YPA-GB47, you will deviate, you will deviate, are you blind as well as –"

Balthier slaps the release for their projectiles and backhands off the comm. His seat scarcely allows for the range of motion necessary as he sends them into a long diagonal fall. Fran does not see the destroyer die, and only feels a slight shudder for that Balthier has steered them well away from the force of that explosion.

Fran only realizes they are flying right-way up again when her hair falls into her face.

"When I liberated the Strahl," Balthier says, his voice shaking, "she had no weapon system installed. I thought the destroyer would have her shields up, and – I don't think they had any shields up at all. Honestly, what sort of officer is the Akademy turning out if they fly against a hostile ship without shields?"

"The Strahl has no shields. That was an evenly matched battle."

"I can't afford shields," Balthier says, and laughs, manic. "I don't think I can afford repairs. Gods, the wind resistance is dragging at me like it's trying to break my arm – there's nothing I can – Fran, will you take the fucking secondary controls instead of just sitting there staring at me? I know my magnificence is compelling, but--"

.

The flight is long, and painful. They cannot risk landing and being unable to rise again. There are closer ports, but it is only Balfonheim that has no docking fee, that does not care about the Strahl's Archadian serial, nor potential legal writs against her crew. With the drain of power for the sudden drag against the Strahl's body, flight is not an easy thing. Fran has not the skill for this sort of piloting. Balthier sits, magick flowing through him to compensate for the loss of mechanics, rigid, reads air currents and charts without cease. He angles them always to the path of least resistance, magick and muscle together, to the flow of wind that supports instead of conflicts with their direction.

He does not sing nor speak. Fran only flies through the middle of the day, when heat and wind both fall steady and Balthier pretends to sleep. The worst is in those few hours about dawn and dusk, when the heat differential between land, air, water all combine to tax Balthier, to strip every thought he can consider. They cannot fly high for the surety of wind-currents there; where that wing has ripped away, the hull is conspicuously ruptured.

Balthier wakes her often with a call through the comm; she knows for what, and makes her way to the hydraulics. Half asleep, she casts ice about the room to cool the steaming parts, only to watch motion and strain melt that spell within moments. The metal has tolerance for heat and cold both, but not both at once, not with such strain. Fran wonders if Balthier will land before the ship dies, or if he will want them to die with it.

.

In the end they land in Cerobbi, close enough that Balthier sets himself to wait for a Balfonheim hunter to come past. It was like this she had once found him in Golmore's jungle, depending on a chance saviour.

He does not ask for her assistance with anything, but the moment she descends, carrying her bow and the canteens for fresh water, Balthier retreats. On her return he is still nowhere to be seen. The ship cants even aground, one side frayed apart as though corroded. She marvels that he could fly it so wounded, and sets the gathered water into the small kitchen for later use. At least they are stranded in Cerobbi, and not Dalmasca's deadly desert.

She finds him abed. She had thought to find him weeping, but instead he merely stares at the curved ceiling, his hands cupped behind his neck and elbows projecting off the narrowness of the bunk. Fran sits crosslegged on her own bunk. Her ears touch the hull that she can hear the shudder and creak of cooling metal. She allows the silence time to breathe.

"Fifty years it took me to swallow all my tears at losses unfair and unfounded. You have done far better than I to still be dry."

His voice is broken with exhaustion. "Fifty years for your tears; better than I so wry, and dry. You are a poet, love."

"Shall I spin you some sleep?"

"Save your spells for the beasts. They will come, and the hull's integrity to prohibit entry is lost." He laughs then, brittle. "A mistake to presume anything Archadian-born had any integrity to begin with. A little bit of rough handling and we all fall apart."

"And yourself?"

"Oh," he snarls then, "doubt not my integrity, Fran. I'll pay you what I owe."

"Should we abandon the ship you could cut your losses—"

"I will not." When he sets his jaw he looks a child, stubborn. "I will not run again."

.

That night Balthier is not asleep for the sparking wire of his nerves, but with his face to the wall he pretends so. Fran does not call his bluff for the guard she keeps. Thus far there have only been coeurl prowling, bold to broach the Strahl's Hume-scented corridors. The wyrms leave them alone.

The thick night does nothing to hide Balthier's whisper, and this song is unlike his usual—

"—think, of a citizen who dreams of it, who has a working model in her heart, who shudders in those moments when she learns, by listening, what song the working parts are singing; how well the lyrics fit."

She will not stir him without dire necessity, for even this false slumber amounts to rest.

On the morrow his temper is worse, but at least he is active. She is following his direction, deep in the Strahl's central service duct for the lesser breadth of her shoulder and the greater reach of her arm, sounding the seals for him to hear their temper after the strain. After one or two discordances, Fran learns to hear which have cracked and which have not. They will forge new ones, for to risk even a short flight with those in such a state, once cooled, twice heated, would risk cracking the entire engine's head.

The slap on her right buttock is violent enough to make her jerk and crack her own head. When she worms out, she finds Balthier with his arms crossed, staring at the horizon. The day is full of crickets and the smell of grass, and would be pleasant without the Strahl's carcass marring the terrain. The light out here is almost blinding, especially as it reflects from Balthier's white shirt.

"Put some clothes on," he says, "I don't need your fuzzy arse in my face when I'm trying to think."

"Take some clothes off." She does not let her gaze drop when he turns. "I dislike the stink of your sweat in my nose on a day as warm and welcoming as this."

To her surprise, he tugs at his shirt with violent motion. He has an undershirt on, near-transparent with sweat, tufts of hair poking out of the neckline. She sees then what he has not shown her, the extent of dark bruising along his ribs and flank, the stripes across him for the fall against the straps of his seat, and the last shock: where magick has striped him crossways along the bone, taking the price for its use from his skin.

She steps back when she sees what he would intend: to tie his shirt about her waist.

"Go, then," he shouts, and surrenders his shirt to the wind. "Go on, leave, I'll not run away. You can flee across the Steppe to Balfonheim without any concern. Every day you're here you cost me more. I paid for this ship with my flesh, I bled for it, and wept for it; Gods and Vayne Solidor know what I went through for this freedom. I'll not pay you with that same currency, my love, my flesh, my blood, in exchange for what, for what, false loyalty, false words? I broke both my arms trying to embrace that servitude once before, and I do learn, Vayne, I learn my lesson well. My everything for your nothing, my all to conceal your lack, is that the extent of your bargain?"

Fran does not know what to say then, nor to whom he speaks. His eyes look at her, and through her.

"If you have such a concern for this debt between us, you have a solution present already. Sign me a portion of the Strahl's title."

"I would give you the shirt off my back," he is bitter enough that he should spit, "but that I have offered that already."

.

There is something of love that is crueler than life, Fran thinks, as she abandons that shattered wreck for the horizon. Fran has made this observation before and wondered that Humes would dare name such an emotion so. Love is always cruel, selfish, unnecessary, corruptive; she has never doubted Balthier's want to avoid it that he could instead live. Life or love: the choice for those such as he, such as she. They cannot bear both burdens.

Yet she returns to Balfonheim, gathers Nono, collects her hover from its shed and loads a transport tray with parts, with the tools for an impromptu forge, with a myst-heavy stone for power. She sets out again with the dust from her trek still ground into her skin and the sand of three sleepless nights in her eyes.

They arrive at the site too far into night's fall. Nono flings his flaming bombs into the pride of coeurl that crawl about the Strahl's wounds, lapping myst in place of blood. Fran wields her bow and kills those that do not scatter, but their deaths grant her small ease. There are – many, so many. Nono growls his dismay for the Strahl's state, his trembling paws lingering along the lips of her scars. Fran cannot sight Balthier, cannot find him in the cat-slashed wreck of the interior, in the shredded, blood-stinking mattress of his bunk. He does not respond to his name, shouted into the night from the depths of her lungs, Balthier, Balthier—

She must close her eyes, dry though they are, and follow his scent through the darkness of the ship. He has left so many trails of passing that she cannot determine which are new and which old; she is not a scenthound to read the fourth dimension of time, to read the truth or torment of a man. In the end it is the blood on his bunk that sparks her consideration. She opens herself to blood instead of Balthier, and finds him at the mechanism that unfolds the Strahl's wings.

From a safe distance, Fran applies her arrows to those cats that prowl below, alternating between growling up at Balthier's nook and lapping at the leak of his blood. His gun, she remembers suddenly as she fires, is gone; it failed in Tchita. But where is his hated sword? There are claw-marks on the wall, on the pistons that relay motion, on the housing of the crystals. The supplementary rings here have been wrecked by the burn of aimless coeurl magic. Balthier does not stir as she climbs the great pistons, awkward for the way they slide under her weight. Her claws are useful here to find the grip left by couerl scratches. She cannot contemplate the rage that would have had Balthier climb these difficult shafts, wounded, to reach where he currently sprawls across a cable tray. It would have been rage, yes. She has seen him angered, and she has smelled his fear: yet cannot picture him afraid of this.

He is half-conscious, damaged, ill-healed with potion for the great bite on his shoulder, the clawmarks that shred his trousers to rend his thigh. He is shivering, hot to touch, and stinks of infection. He would have fallen to sleep for these wounds to strike, unable to stay awake for the exhaustion of his flight and his solitude. Prey to their usual prey. She cannot feel guilt for abandoning him, for he has survived and she has the means now to be his saviour again. There is no place in a Viera's thought for guilt; there is no place in a pirate's mercantile heart for a thing as worthless as regret.

The cable tray groans under their paired weight. Fran can barely lift Balthier that instead she holds him close and spells float despite her own exhaustion. When the cable tray collapses, she lets them both fall, light against the clattering violence of that weak metal's collapse.

"Fran," he whispers, "you're a bitch for coming back."

There is something tremendously cruel about love, for the first words out of her mouth are:

"The rates for rescue fees have risen thirty percent on the Balfonheim hunt boards. Archadian aggressors have been quite active of late."

"Good," Balthier slurs into the skin of her neck, "I'll sell you my soul. But never my fucking ship."

.

For the ill-used potion, Fran sets herself to open his infected wounds again. She does not like to see Balthier like this, sweating without effort and screaming into his wrist. The bites and wounds of scavengers are ever filthy. Her blade releases two days worth of rot into the clean night air, and sends him mad despite the familiar night sky, despite the warmth of flame nearby. She must turn Balthier to release the bite that has closed about his whole shoulder.

His struggle then is entirely different, and too familiar. He fights her without seeing her.

"—not," he weeps, "here, not here, gods, it hurts, hurts—"

"Balthier, it is Fran." His struggle scatters blood everywhere, across her face, into her fur and hair, striping the grass. In addition to that sickened bite there are clawmarks along his back, bulging and raw. He would have tried to run to have been struck so. "Fran – the Viera. Balthier, hear me, you must be still."

"There's Viera here?" He weeps and laughs into the bundled shirt Fran set for a pillow, arching against her hand and then away. "Oh, my vanity, the girls aren't enough, even the non-Humes watch your games, my vanity, my vainglory?"

She cannot wield the blade. Red ribbons along the pallor of his back, under the surface of his skin. He flames where she touches. "Balthier, be still, or I will spell you so."

"Oh," he says, and stills with terror, "you—aren't doing this to me, vanity. You can't, you aren't, you wouldn't, oh, gods, where are you, Vayne?"

Fran cuts, that pus and blood leaks. Such would be deadly without her curative to follow, but the illness needs a route to escape. Balthier retches, and gasps, "—oh, it hurts more the second time, that's not right—"

—and that, even the words, too familiar, that she hears it echo in the silence of her own mind and memory. Fran cannot bring herself to cut him any more, though she should, she needs to. She can see the race of his heart against the flesh between his ribs. She pins him, holds him firm, and spells.

He screams for the curative until he is out of breath, and does not stop even then. Soundless and arching; she feels his skin crawl beneath her, the sundering of half-healed flesh as it pushes out that bound infection. She must spell him again, to heal the ravage of that first ripping reconstruction; he weeps.

At last, he falls, quiescent.

"Release me. Fran."

She does, to wipe the sick remnant from his flesh with wet cloths Nono has set aside. Balthier sits up. She sees the magick has pulled its fee from his flesh again, if less specifically this time: to have drawn all the energy from his muscle, all the strength, the scarce excess of his flesh spent on healing. He is – too thin, that without fever now he starts to shiver against the night's chill.

"Wyrm," Nono calls, from his perch atop the Strahl's slant. "Fran, get Balthier up here, wyrm!"

"I will not run." Balthier presses fingertips to his eyelids. He will not see. "I will not run, I will not, not from a wyrm—"

"You have no guns, no blades, no way to fight."

"Let's be fair," he rasps, in cadence if not tune, "let's be fair, while you are nicely here I am halfway there; you are wined and dined and written of; I will drink a cup of nothing, far more bitter than yours—"

"If you would have your life instead of nothing," Fran shakes him, and only then realizes she shouts, "then you will rise when I tell you to rise! Your wounding is one of ignorance, of your pride; I will not let that pride trip you into a grave!"

He faints when he stands, a snarl still on his lips. For that unconscious compliance, she hauls him to retreat.

.

Balthier does not speak to her for the days they labor to clean, patch, then lift the re-fuelled Strahl and limp back to Balfonheim.

Nono finds the Strahl a hangar, unequipped with anything for extensive repairs and well on the outskirts of the city, but cheaper than a long-term licensed dock. Balthier sleeps there, well away from any who may have known him, who might mock. He keeps himself well-dressed, clean-shaven, his hair cropped. Fran will not leave the ship. He makes use of her as distraction again when he turns himself to theft for jewels and food, but his usual hard humor is absent.

He is strangely suited to that illegality he sets himself to: Hume marks instead of bestial ones. He twists his way through narrow windows and narrower minds with a smile and a subversive charm that she knows is unlike him, a falseness. He sells what he has never owned, and is not questioned for it. He makes consistent petty profits from this that she wonders why he had not tried before but that he visibly detests every day of it, and sleeps his nights full of nightmares. This, she thinks, was what he was in Archades.

It disturbs her when she finds Balthier is keeping a tally of the tasks he sets her towards. His only response to her query is that he expects no favors from her, or anyone.

.

Balthier disappears with no word for days at a time. On his return to the Strahl he is ever sleeked to a new frightening thinness. The fourth time he does so Fran hunts him then, to determine what he does.

"You can stop keeping an eye on me," he tells her when she pins him in an alley. His new gun is heavy across his shoulder, dulled, ugly, and entirely deadly. "I'll pay you what I owe you, I'll not abscond."

"You are taking hunts, word on the street tells me so. Hunts, on your own. Will you risk injury as you did last time without someone to watch your back?"

"I will risk everything. What else do I have to lose?"

"You are not a gambling man—"

"All my sureties proved quite flimsily founded," he says, blithe. "That Viera care nothing for property, for example. I will lay my bets elsewhere."

Fran takes her own hunts then, for she must have some way to keep herself though the Strahl provides her bed. She sees Balthier at the Whitecap, on occasion, but the dynamic is especially different. He does not lead another to his room, or even their room. He is not arm in arm with a woman or a sky-struck boy. He is led. He still pays for nothing, but only for that she suspects he is paid. He smiles, too much, and is over-mannered for the extent of his prior mockery of this nighttime game.

She moves to catch Balthier in the bathhouse when he thinks to steal a shower, before dawn that the staff do not eject him. The creak of his tread down the hall is an unmistakable one for that she has heard it so often. The slap of pistol against his thigh, the jingle of his jewelry, the way he lets his weight fall so heavily. He does not turn at the creak of the door; she cannot, she supposes, surprise him.

"Must you trap me so?" he asks, his hands at the collar of his shirt.

"I never thought to trap you."

"To bed me, and sway me, to lull me, to bare everything and reveal nothing; Fran, Fran, I trusted you and all you wanted was my ship."

"No, you never trusted me, and for that I will have your apology."

"What's it worth?"

"Your trust," Fran asks, aching, "or your apology? They cannot be valued."

As he moves closer she cannot look away for the open fall of his shirt over that now-scarred torso. He is stiffened with muscle, not enough flesh, and excesses of pride. When Balthier sets himself eye to eye with her, she smells the stink of a woman's perfume on him, the remnant of sour lust. His breath is hard for their proximity. She must touch, a sense she indulges so rarely. The backs of her fingers to the hair of his chest, to curl into a fist; she pulls, as though to test the elasticity of his skin.

"There is a name for women like you." His grin is cruel for the sour trace of last night's wine. "You want me to work off my debt on my knees; there is a name for women like you."

"Fran. You promised to remember it."

"Lessons learned, once burned," he shrugs away, presents her with the arrogant, careless slouch of his shoulders, and pulls off his shirt, "I doubt I will ever be able to forget it."

Fran tells his bare, scarred, elegant back, "you cannot understand that last promise is a lie."

.

The anger in Balthier in undeniable. When they are together, she sees the truth of it unmasked by his overweening performance, his need to ingratiate. Fran would argue against his rejection. His pride, his decision, his choice; she could have let him die for the sake of his youth, his inexperience, and it is unfair that he detests her for assuring his life.

He sleeps with his eyes to the Strahl's ceiling, his hands outside the sheet and folded across his chest. His long fingers are lax only when he truly sleeps. She turns and cannot see his eyes for the lack of light. She hears the depth of his breath, slow and steady. She hears the slow motion of his fingers tapping as though he counts even in the dark.

"Is it so unforgivable, Balthier, that I find in you more worth than is contained in the value of a ship?"

"If that's so true why do you want my ship?"

"That was a thought, and a careless one. I have seen the extent to which you resent your indenture."

"Why are you still here?" Balthier asks. She hears him stir, to sit; he is no more than another sound in the dark. "I have nothing to give you, no piratical glamour or wondrous entertainment to amuse your wants."

"Why must I leave? Do you hate me so?"

"Not hate. Not hate – I can't – look at you, Fran."

"You detest me because you consider yourself worthless."

"And how does that follow?"

"Any who dares find worth in you must obviously be so worthless themselves, to want something you consider valueless."

He laughs then, through a thick throat. "I'll not walk into that web however you wait, weeping for my non-existent wounds. Don't you know what I'm worth? –why, half an airship, even!"

The touch of his bare foot on the deck is too loud in this darkness, the creak of his weight shifting. His hand falls on her thigh, his knee between. She does not sit up for the feel of him over her. His fingers find the sheet at her neck.

"I thought you could not look at me."

He sings: "In the dark, no sight for the site, a source of pleasure involuntary; to fuck the young again, alive with quicksilver lust and impossible poetry." His hands find the line of her ribs, the narrowness of her waist, to pinch. "Is this not why you're still here? Will I not find you wet for me, with all my fucking failures?"

She is ungentle with her claws. "Will I not find you hard for me and all my fucking failures?"

—but against the loose fit of his trousers, he is not.

"Don't," he says, and sounds a child even as his own hand touches her as a child should not. "Oh, Fran, don't, leave me my pride if you would take everything else, just let me – let me give you – what I can."

She lifts her hips when he feels for her, to slide paired forefingers within. He moves that his shadowy weight is no longer over her. His lips are pressed to her thigh to mark where he then rests his head. The feel of his hair, his breath, has her bite her lip. She runs her hand through that crop of curl to make him shiver. Strangely, that sensation of his sensation gives her some relief.

He moves his hand slowly, to set his knuckles to her flesh and withdraw completely before he progresses again. He twists as he moves, not seeking, but that she hears her own liquid lust in that darkness.

"You must be like this for everyone," he speaks into her thigh, "just hot-blooded Viera lust, cock-hungry. Is that it?"

Fran remembers long ago: burn, and terror, bewilderment. She should have forgotten, and in the Wood, would have. Would have forgotten everything. "Not always—"

She lifts the leg he has not pinned when his third finger slides beside the others. No warning, but for all of that she makes no noise beside the quickening of her breath.

"You could take more, even more of me, I feel it."

"Does it surprise you, would-be pirate, when you take the world's woes onto yourself that I can take more?"

"You mock me, so have it then." He slides the fourth to open her to the air. "Oh, you—"

She tenses then, and must think to loose for he does not stop his hand's motion. His knuckles are against her flesh, back, again. Balthier moves upwards, inching, to press his lips against the crease of thigh and stomach. "You know nothing of me, to measure me against only your own limited thought."

"Thought," he flexes, thrusts, faster, to make her surge, to make her groan, "or wrist, what think you a better span to fit your measure?"

And she thinks, in a tangle: I have no urge to consider your cleverness, no words in my mouth but for the stale spit of years past and salt better forgotten. My years you ridicule but in your life you will live more than I even can in thrice its measure! I am – I have done less even than you, touched more but felt far less! You will touch – the world, with an impact of your presence, your memory in the minds of a multitude, and I – to ever fade, for who remembers one of _us_ against the great faceless mass of mindless, camouflaged beauty? In a year, in two – in ten – whatever it takes you will have forgotten my face, my name, my wants and my wandering. I have hungered, I have starved, and however I feast I find only emptiness no matter for how I fill myself I cannot find myself, for the Word – the Word, lost to me, that I hear only silence and into that you talk, every of your waking moments you talk and talk that the only word I hear is yours and for that I want to listen you will hate me, for what? I will not trap you, Balthier, however that I hunt you. 

He is heaven, and blissful, for he does not stop his motion. "You're coming all over my hand, I can feel it. I've never – women never come like this—"

"Not," she growls, and reaches, "yet—"

He moves when she does, onto his knees and over her that when she grips his forearm she finds him flexed, that gunner's tension trembling with strain and so firm. "All?" he says, and it is nearly a whimper.

"Do you doubt?"

"No, no, you feel – Fran—you're – I don't want to hurt you."

"Belated to speak such a wish!"

She does not cry out, yet he does. She has not relinquished her hold in his hair regardless of his shift in posture. Not the fifth; it is the breadth of his knuckles. She pulls his hair that he thinks only of his pain and not hers. There is heat in the air, scent; her heat, her scent. There is a strange purity in that thickness of her self, that regardless his presence her lust is hers and only hers, no corruptive Hume thought or static Viera way. Fran is aqueous, acquiescent; she exhales and sinks, she inhales, to rise, for Balthier is at the edge of the sky.

"—Fran?"

"Move. Oh, move."

He does, and his other hand also to feel the closeness of her flesh about him, to fumble upwards in the dark to fondle her breast distractedly. His tongue touches the shallowness of her navel and has her sound, for the sensation is unexpected and cool against the existing excess. When he bends to the tense flesh above his hand she cries, for it is electric through her wholeness and eradicates all higher thought.

When he withdraws it is with such ease. She must stir herself to pull him close, a grip in the dark that scratches him and releases a curl of iron blood before she closes her fingers about his wrists. He sinks to his side and puts his forehead to her shoulder. Now, now his cock beats his pulse against her thigh, frantic.

"You're sweating, Fran."

"I am well."

"My hand – is – are you bloodied?"

"No." She finds his hand from where his awkwardness sets it. He does not know where to rest it. Fran moves her own fingers over that slickness to map his skin, the wrinkle of his joints, the resilient fine bone beneath. "Can you not smell it?"

"I – all I can smell is you."

"Thus no blood." When she sits, her head spins for the darkness. She feels along the length of his chest, the long lines of his belly. "I will taste you, if you will not find your completion within me."

"I don't want—"

" _I_ want."

"There is in this act too much of an imbalance bred in me. Through poor experience, if you will, forced and forcing and trading favors without want and – I cannot trust you if you – I want you to, but I will not."

"It is not Balfonheim that has bred in you such reluctance."

"No," he says, "but Archades. Oh, it was all a game there, like trading chops or treats and gambling on who would do more or less or greater. I did not think I would lose so profoundly. I cannot quite pretend it is a game here. I have nearly died now, too many times; is it my age that makes Balfonheim not quite the dream I dreamed? Or are my dreams, simply, as flawed as I?"

"A risk to gamble with trust as token." Fran strokes his cock instead with fragile care, to feel the rise of his worry for her claws as well as his pulse for her touch. His delicious light terror, spicing the lust. "A lover?"

"A brother. A father, a family, a friend, a liege, a lord, a love; what should these words mean but for risk, for jeopardy. All men, to break my heart, all women, useless to prevent such happenstance, to stand and watch. Watching useless women and the masked malice of men: that is Archades, and I am Archadian. All my wants are suspect." He disengages her hand. "I should let you sleep."

"Stay."

"The bunk is narrow."

"Stay."

She settles with him behind her, his cock hard against her however he would ignore it. She cannot help but rock against him. His shoulders are firm against the window, his knees behind hers. Her own elbows and knees project over the edge into the thick air. The Strahl is not engineered for their heights, certainly not paired so.

"Can you sleep so unrelieved?"

He laughs then, and pauses to clear his mouth of her hair. "Long practice of nights on the field beside you have taught me well enough."

"Oh, Balthier."

"Yes, oh at me, ah at me, make whatever sound you will. I should not fall prey to my own lust."

"On the morrow, Balthier, you will wake here, in my bed. What will you do then – what will we do then?" It is ever the mornings that threaten him with remorse.

"Sochen." He speaks after a long enough hesitation that it is only his cock that tells her he is still awake. "There's a mark in Sochen, a dangerous one, but I will not let this imbalance lie between us, Fran."

"An imbalance wrought of your pride."

"If you would have me," he says, sternly, "then you will have all of me, and that does include my significantly sized and dual-winged pride."

"You will not take this mark alone."

"It is dangerous. Especially for Viera."

"A beast that hunts only Viera? I have yet to hear of such a thing. Do you sing me a song?"

"If that Archadian scholar was true, and your evolutionary defense engendered in you a form to please a Hume male's want; is it so strange to consider that a beast should develop to hunt a specific set of characteristics?"

His cock is softening.

"Balthier," Fran says, "you intend to go to Archades."

"Dangerous," he states, flatly, "especially for Viera."

"Even more so for Balthiers, You do not have to go."

"I will not have this debt linger between us," he says again.

Fran will not argue, for any further words would only sway him further to his thought.

.

And Balthier sings as they go, with his theft of teleport stones and the awkwardness of the pursuit at the Balfonheim gate for all stones are traceable and tell of their theft; the way they must run when they land in Tchita, into the hills to hide when pursuit comes. He sings as they slay, she with her old Viera bow that she thinks, at last, she must get another; he with a pair of guns that look nearly antique for the customization in ivory and silver that she will not ask which Balfonheim pseudo-gentry he filched them from this time. He is bedecked with new jewels, of metal and stone, a new ring in his ear, Dalmascan lace at his throat; he looks, with that crooked smile that is the only asymmetry about him, a true pirate now, nonchalant and careless and especially debonair that she cannot find a flaw in his performance, a crack in that façade, and wonders if perhaps this is he, half-crazed but sleek with it, smug. He sings, a song she knows from a time two decades ago. It is an epic, this one, of dead heroes and horrors that she wonders at his mood.

"—what does he hope to find in this valley of the dead but some baroque piece of mind, a crown upon his head—"

"Enough," Fran says, for they are at the mouth of Sochen Palace, the gates still glorious for all their ancient splendor once won, now wasted.

"I thought you liked my singing. Fills all that empty space in your pretty little head, I think were your words."

"Yet when you have sung all the songs, there will only be an echo."

"Are you calling me unoriginal?" He shouts into that cave's carved mouth: "however he lived, he died with far more dignity than they expected, for he died most horrifyingly like a man!"

The cave does not echo. Balthier's last words fall flat.

"I hate caves." He holsters one gun to tend the other. "Did I ever tell you?"

"The darkness."

"In part. There's no sky or stars, I can't orient; the chaos inside follows no pattern of planning I can determine. And it smells, sort of damp even when it isn't. I feel like I'm being swallowed alive – why are you laughing at me?"

"Sky born, not earth born; the earth's womb does not welcome you, yet you will dare these depths to reach your peak?"

"Very funny, for Viera humor." His guns loaded, he settles his belts. "In truth, I didn't think Viera had a sense of humor."

"Viera do not. I am not a Viera."

"How awful, to live so long and never be able to laugh at the absurdity of such length."

"How long did it take you to realize you must laugh at yourself?"

He strikes a pose born of melodrama. "I am rather absurd, yet also quite perverse. I don't know what you see in me. I would have run away from me at least six months ago."

"The reasoning behind my presence eludes me," Fran admits, that Balthier startles. "Yet the feeling does not. I see me, and you, and all you could be and all that I could have been."

"—you equate me to yourself? A self-pity fuck? Spare me. We are not alike."

"Yet what traps you but the memory of your flesh; what a trap you are for the symmetry of your features?"

He says, eventually, "I always did prefer your silence, my dear."

"No, Balthier. Say Fran, and please me."

Balthier offers her only his arm and a smile, and escorts her into that dungeon.

.

In Old Archades, Balthier tells her nothing beyond that he needs to find a particular banker.

His disguise is more camouflage that she expected from its glory. He leads her through Old Archades and whispers to her those faces he recognizes, but his bluff is never called. Everyone looks only at their glamour, half-clad Viera and dazzling Sky Pirate, and never at his face.

"Though I suppose my face has changed," he notes, with his arm about her waist. His hand lingers on the borderline of respectability, long fingers pointed directly to her scant-clad groin. The Old Archadians look at that, and not the way he scours the signs, hunting. "Sixteen to eighteen. It's a fair change for that I never had to shave when I left and now I need to twice a day."

Fran stumbles on a step, that his other hand commits indecency to correct her. "Eighteen?"

"How many years did you think I wore?"

" _Eighteen?_ "

"Concerned you've made a fool of yourself?" He pauses to set his cheek to hers at something he sights; she holds, motionless, to hear a contingent of armored guards move past them in rhythmic order. "It would be preferable if you avoided mention of my family name. I don't know how you managed to discover so much of me having never asked me a question."

"You talk entirely too much, that should answer that complaint. Let me question, then: what was your name, here?"

"Unimportant."

"You will not have me believe your father so uncaring as to name you Unimportant."

"You would be surprised; he might have remembered that name better than my true one." He corrects: "My first one."

Their glamorous camouflage covers them until they reach the steps to upper Archades. Balthier sits them in an convenient alley, perching atop an empty barrel to consider that guard. His heels swing to drum; Fran contemplates the swirl of debris in the waterway that passes so close by. The light is pleasant enough, if weak for the refraction off upper Archades.

"What I wouldn't give for a trifle of Viera evolutionary defense right now. Are you willing to perhaps run naked into Old Archades and seduce the guard after you?"

"I doubt my salient features will engender much desire to protect in such a circumstance."

"How does it protect you in the Wood, then?"

"In numbers, is my understanding. Are you familiar with the way a school of fish will swim?"

"I know the terminology. Identical numbers clustering to bewilder the predator, with their buxom display, or rather, the sheen of scale. I have seen many a flock of Archadian girls do the same; in sameness, there is safety."

"Yet one must fall to sate the hunter that the whole will survive. Therein is such protection, that the same consistency of the group continues when one is lost, for her offering is nothing that cannot be replaced."

Balthier regards her, steadily. His gaze is too sharp. She should not have spoken.

"What do you call the color of your eyes, gold and green and earthen all in one?"

"I don't know what others would call it," he says, slowly. "Hazel, perhaps."

"I have never heard that term before. It is little like the colour of a hazel tree, or the fruit. Sun falling on leaves, perhaps."

"Are you attempting to distract me by complementing my eyes? Were you – Why did you leave the Wood, Fran?"

"This is not the place for asking such a question." Fran does meet his gaze then, hazel or otherwise named, and too intent. "Forget the scholar: it is the Wood's Way, one for the sake of many. I am in the world now, a part of the flow of time and of the will to stir that flow, though such an impact is a thought still alien to me. I cannot contemplate a thing such as regret."

"Your sisters let you – be predated for their sake, and then threw you out?"

"I left of my choice. I could not stay where I had been made so distinct. I am free now, to act or react as I will. Do not contemplate this as worthy of your dismay. I yet have my sisters, as you still have your brothers."

"My brothers are dead."

Fran shrugs, to mimic his usual mannerism. "As I did say."

"Wait," he says, and slides off that barrel. "I will not risk you in Upper Archades."

Fran is willing enough to wait in Old Archades in the disguise Balthier finds her. A scarf binds her ears flat, a threadbare cloak enveloping her body. She waits, perched on a barrel in the lazy lassitude of that weak Archadian sun, and watches the too-thin children play.

They sing constantly as they run, the words and tunes almost a battle between them, singing to greater heights. She is glad she came: this, then, is where Balthier learned his habit.

.

Fran watches the mood of Old Archades turn as the world does. Balthier is gone for long enough it gets cold and dark. She is glad for her bow, but gladder that Balthier insisted she hide her ears and carry a blade. She holds still enough that when the clusters of running youths look into the alley they see only shadow. The long knife sits uneasily in her palm; she is truly only suited to fight from that archer's distance, but a strung bow would be too notable when she seeks only to be unobserved.

She hears the runner before she sees him. The pace is Balthier's, the way his stride hitches, the jingle, the slap of his gun-belts. There is a heavy flutter, though; he wears a cloak. The clatter and crash of metal in pursuit does not bode well. She reaches for her bow.

Balthier grins when he sees her, a slash of white in that murky dark. The cloak bells behind him as he runs, to wrap him nearly to the point of tripping him when he turns to face the mouth of the alley. He hurls, something – a bomb, stinking with sulfur noxiousness that the guards halt, choking.

"The rooves," and he leaps onto a barrel to climb. An arrow shafts through the smoke to shatter on the stone where he had stood. He takes her hand to assist her.

"Your endeavor failed."

"I've forgotten what it means to succeed." They must move slowly for the skitter of tile, and his grin seems there only to spite the bitterness she hears. "He cut me out, Fran. My inheritance. My mother left me those lands, to me, her third and last and the youngest is always forgotten, so she left them to me. Gone, all gone."

"You are landed?"

"What, would you have asked for my lands instead of my ship if you knew?" He slips, to crack his knee. He rises before she reaches him. "I paid for my freedom once with Archadian currency. Foolish to think I could have done the same trick twice. I must strive for originality."

"The guards are dense below, I can hear."

"I know they're dense, otherwise they'd also take to the rooftops. Find a refuge, you think?"

"Yet can we, in Archades?"

"They will be looking for the Doctor's prodigal," Balthier says, grim. "Not a Skypirate and Viera. Our especial camouflage is in being distinct and notable."

.

Balthier finds them, perhaps unsurprisingly, refuge in a brothel.

It is a house in slightly better condition than the ruin that surrounds it. The only evidence as to its purpose is an especially lewd graphic that hangs beside the door and the faintest strain of sound and scent that escapes. Balthier steps inside without hesitation, holding the door open for her.

Inside a pair of guards eye him and her, unmoving but for that gaze. Fran can see beyond the anteroom to where the lounge operates as a strange form of celebration, an orchestrated dance disturbing in its regularity as girls circle with drinks and men circle with their stares. The proprietor startles at the sight of them, her eyes on Fran's height and up to the ears having slipped free from the scarf. That expression is nothing compared to the shock that reveals when Balthier chucks the woman on one of her many chins, grins, and says: "If you look longer than a second I'll have to start charging, love."

The woman bites back a curse, spits, and says, almost in horror, "Ffamran, what in the name of all seven hells—"

"Same song as before, my fat little whore. Guards coming, father raging, the prodigious length of my vanity tripping me yet again; and to think I strive so hard for originality. Will you hide me?"

"I can't hide her—"

"Fran, take off your cloak."

The woman eyes that reveal with evident disapproval despite her own less-that-friendly corsetry, and says, "Oh, I think I understand. A room, then?"

"Can you spare one? You look quite full."

"Spare? Oh, no, milord, not _spare_. I think you stink, but your money's as good as the next."

"My father's money."

The woman hesitates, and nods. "The attic then; expect to be disturbed. You know where the stairs are?"

"How could I ever forget?"

Balthier leads her up a flight of stairs, a second, a third, the wood beneath creaking dangerously as they pace. The room only holds their height in the very centre under the apex of the slanting roof, but for all of that tightness the wood is polished to a fine glow that reflects, to infinity, the candles that Balthier sets himself to light.

There is only a bed, frameless, a mattress set to the floor and wrapped in stainless, scentless satin. Fran arrays herself there, and after a moment of frustrated, half-crouched pacing, Balthier lies beside her with his shoulder to hers.

"Milord Ffamran?" Fran says, when the silence reveals too many sounds of strain rising from the floors beneath them.

"If you laugh at me I'll pinch you."

Her skin tightens, as though he had. "Tell me where, first, and I will laugh all you want."

Balthier turns his head first, to face her, so she mirrors that. His smirk is barely there. "I'll pinch you all you want in Balfonheim."

"How safe is this, Balthier?"

"Not at all. The guards will do a room-by-room. Old Archades is used to such raids. Admittedly, the way I used to hide was under a wig and wearing some particularly large-shouldered whore's lacework. People are blind to what they don't want to see. The dishonour of having found me in women's garb would have outweighed the honour of finding me."

"Is it your father that sets these to hunt you?"

"No." She hears the bitterness. "Not him. It's for the Strahl. I suspect there's a courtmartialling writ for me somewhere. Possibly execution. Vayne Solidor does not like his toys disappearing even when he no longer wants to play with them."

"You have insisted you paid for the ship."

"Some currency," Balthier says, "the Solidors choose not to recognize, despite the coin being minted right here."

Fran cannot listen to the sound of his breath then, fraught, punctuated by the brothel's purpose below. Their camouflage is dependent on their performance. She rises to her knees, her ears touching the slant of the ceiling, and unfastens her limited leathers.

Balthier says nothing, and only looks. His fingers twitch, the muscle of his shoulders rippling, but he does not move to look away. His lips move, soundless, but she sees the words and the form of a refusal, not here.

"We are skypirates. The world is open for a skypirate's flight." Fran attends the too-tight clasps of Balthier's brocaded vest. "Archades is just another port of call. There is nothing distinct to set this city's beds against another's."

"It's all gone wrong. Coming here, and still I have nothing. So damningly wrong. You were supposed to be safe."

"I am safe."

"You misunderstand. You were supposed to be safe for me. I wasn't supposed to feel anything for you."

Fran rakes her nails along the serration of his ribs, without concern for his feeling.

He sounds and shudders to an extent she had not expected, as though he would shake off his skin. Red welts rise. Balthier reaches, then, to harshly, crushing breast against rib, the fingers of his other hand curled to dig against her shoulder blade. A small sigh escapes her.

As though that sound were the key, he moves with a ferocity she has never witnessed in him even in battle. His lips crush hers, his hands pin her arms motionless; he rolls, too forceful, to pin her beneath him. There is a moment of awkwardness as he curses, his hand caught between them as he struggles with the fastening of his trousers. His belts he hurls across the room, and shoves away her garb. He reaches over her to pull down a pillow; she reaches instead for the jut of his cock.

Yet her touch recalls his sensibility where she would have driven that away. Wild-eyed, "Fran, Fran, do you want—"

"Yes, gods, Balthier. _Yes._ "

He grins to cut across the liquid lust of his expression. "You can say it again, if you like."

"You like it."

"It does sound so very good on your lips."

Fran throttles him. Softens. Pulls him down by his neck. His hips fall first, to press his cock against her thighs. His neck bends only after that, and she claims his lips and kisses – to find his tongue and silence him but for the soft sounds he makes against her. His hand moves over her breast more gently now, to roll her nipple and measure the extent of her softness. He does not need his other hand for the purpose to which he would put it, between them. Fran rocks, to lock her heels in the small of his back, and takes the resolution.

He quivers. The rhythm of his kiss shifts, then. The frantic hunger seems eased when she expected it inflamed by her acceptance. The folds of his trousers rub against her, irritating, his shirt in the way of his skin. His fingers are too tender in her hair, to skirt the base of her ears, to linger on her cheekbones as he kisses. His tongue he measures against the length of his slow, hip-rolling thrust; she taps his backside with her heel.

"Oh, let me do this right, Fran. Everything I've ever done before this, my life, all of it: just a rehearsal for this."

"It is not so important," she manages. 

"How can you say that? Everything and one I've ever done has just been a way of filling in time, until now."

Strange, then, it feels, to surrender herself to what he would do. Fran has long been expectant of wringing her own perverse pleasure from a Hume. She cannot quite relax in Balthier's hands when his touch is tender; she cannot quite trust that his thought can possibly span to encompass her.

And that recognition burns through her then; her womb to tighten and all want to do the same about him that he murmurs his own recognition against her hair, a sound, too soft for his lips.

Fran shrinks from thought of the morning, then. It is not the Viera way to think so far forward, but it is her way; she knows what mornings will do to Balthier with remembrance of this. He will only ever see it as weakness, a flaw. Grief mimes in her head that ritual he performs on her that has been performed, again and again, with her will or want noted or not. He may think this his weakness; when will she ever see this embrace as aught but a Hume's ambiguous mercy?

Balthier will take her, and take her back, to leave her, shuddering, blank-faced as one of countless blades of cropped grass.

She weeps then, and he does not halt the roll of his hips as he licks away the tears. Her nipples ache against his shirt, his chest, his hair; her legs are rigid and cramping.

"—coming—"

"Close," she whispers.

"No," his lips touch the shell of her ear as he moves up, to kiss the point of her nose as he moves down, "they're coming, up the stairs. Can you hear?"

She can, now that he calls her attention; the weight of armored tread, two pairs on those creaking steps. That means something, and she cannot recall what but that it sparks an old terror and an image: she, dice-bones shaken and cast and rolled onto black, the frenzy of sex that passes and passes again until she cannot dare to feel.

"Balthier—"

"I won't stop," he vows, steady, "I won't."

"Close," she breathes, "close, closer, closer, Balthier," and so he sinks his weight to her, his arms about her instead of set to hold his distance sacrosanct. With that proximity she does come, and hears somebody sobbing, here or then; Fran arches, and is blind but for Balthier and the mirrored mask he wears—

"No," she whines when his weight no longer holds her to this earth, "back, back, come back, take me back, take me with you—"

It is the sound of a weapon's draw that has recollect herself. She cannot sit up for the sound of threat. Her head tilts, that she can see Balthier's struggle, the way his hand reaches for her before he is slapped down. She cannot understand why he fights, even who he fights. He strives to draw himself together with some dignity for the state of his disarray, his cock still hard and slick despite how he is being held.

"Fuck," Balthier snarls, and at last frees a hand to tuck himself away. His accent is – strange, burred. Rozzarian, she recognizes, and wonders that any could believe it with Balthier's coloring. "Since when do Judges have the right to raid a man's bed?"

"Not your bed," says one of the Judges, hollow in his shell. Fran stares, and blinks against the blur. Balthier's gold and brocade is bright color against their grey steel. "When you make use of an Archadian's bed, pirate, you are here on sufferance. This is a routine search, nothing to be alarmed about if you have your permits and passes in order. What is the name of your ship?"

"Ah," Balthier says, "I didn't come to Archades in a ship."

"Your teleport codes, then."

"I fail to see why I should have to tell you such a—"

Fran sits up then, in a particularly deliberate manner. Elbows back. One of the guards whistles an appreciation that, from Balthier's expression, burns.

"Since when does this house employ a Viera?"

"If I'd known—"

Their masks do not hide their smirking. Balthier curls, frees himself in their distraction, and stumbles for where he dropped his guns.

"Here's my fucking teleport code," he says, and instead of a bullet, flings a bit of paper salvaged from his beltpouch at them. "And get the hell out. You're interrupting business and they charge by the hour here!"

"Charge by the minute," one drawls, "with a set of tits like that—"

"Out!"

In their absence, snickers and long backward glances beside, Balthier lies beside her again. His finger touches a flotsam ringlet of hair on her neck, and smooths those strands away.

"Was I truly so terribly you must cry?"

"No. I am unrepentant. I weep for my lost innocence."

"Never again?" he asks, with a twist of mocking.

"Of that abjuration let only one word remain."

Balthier leans, to touch his lips to hers and say, "—again?"

.

Their return to Balfonheim is a slow one, and for that pace, Fran is grateful.

They walk, and hunt as they go. They stop at several cities along the way, Nalbina, hunt camps, Rabanstre, where they sell what they have fought for. Balthier sets the gil into a Moogle-run bank and drafts missives he sends back to Nono, instructions and directions as to repairing the Strahl's wounds. Balthier moves with his usual arrogance, ahead of her and talking to the air, the grass, the sky; he does not sing again, nor move to touch her in any way other than the necessity of a fight dictates.

Fran cannot touch him back. She is not an Archadian wife to wile her wants out of him nor are they young and unbroken to find succor in constant connection. She asks when she wants him, and he responds willingly. She asks, once, why he will not ask when he wants her and Balthier laughs with the starlight in his eyes—

"If I were to do that, then we should get nowhere for being on our backs all the time."

It takes months, and they do not live like Humes that whole time. They pass through cities and never stay within. They hunt, but not off the boards. They fight and camp, and feed off what they catch; everything is turned to profit.

On their return to Balfonheim they find the Strahl in a state of redesign, again, and better this time for that Balthier will not rush. He disappears with Nono into the dark shadows of a café to discuss the progression. Fran sits in the sunshine outside on a half wall that bounds the docks; she contemplates the shift of the ocean, constant, and the unchanging state of things.

A roll of paper that slides into her cleavage, over her shoulder. She does not look up, for Balthier's spice and the scent of coffee preceded his touch. She draws the roll of paper out.

"I cannot read."

"You lie," Balthier says. "While I did expect Viera to lie, I did think they only did such a thing on their backs. You lied about barbed Moogle pricks and the cock crushing capacity of a Viera cunt too. I know you can read."

"I do not want to read this."

"For that you know what it says?"

Balthier has kept an immaculate tally of services rendered. At some point he shifted her rate of pay, twice, third class to second, second class to first. All unpaid apportions are noted, rescue calls, her healing, her weapon set to his side. The second page lists a scarce summary and valuation of his assets. He does not, she notes, list his considerable pride there.

The third page she shreds and throws to the ocean's wind.

"Hey," he says, with a melodramatic tone of injury that masks – his injury.

"I do not want anything from you but what you will give. I need no _contract_."

His Word, the core of her breathes. His Word, in place of the Wood's Word, and she thinks of how carefully they craft their mutual prisons to resemble comfort.

"That was a copy. The full documents are signed and sealed, and irrefutable. You can try to ignore it, but a forty five percent share of the Strahl's flight and function is entirely yours."

"And we are even. Your consideration of debt is cleared. Did you think perhaps _I_ did not want to be like bound?"

"Oh yes. Did you want me to stay indebted to you, and only one way? That you could always rest assured that you would assuredly know where I would rest? Do you think I cannot recognise a mirror when I look at one? Well, I cannot run now. Nor can you. Your rule is required for where the Strahl will fly. When she is able."

Her anger is old, older than he, and tired of fighting. "What will you do now?"

He perches on the wall beside her, shoulder to her shoulder, and grins without meeting her eyes. "Ah, well, I do hope you don't get lonely quickly."

"You are leaving?"

"I need to get the Strahl in the air, and I can work that quicker if I'm earning a salary."

There are few ways to do that in Balfonheim. "You will sign on a dreadnaught."

"A year, no more. I will relive the horrors of my cadetship. Balfonheim only has a place on military ships, unfortunately, but at least I will be set against the Archadian aggressors. Border watch. Who would have thought it?"

"You do not seem suited positions other than those of authority."

"I might learn something."

Fran examines his profile. He is familiar, from the scant remnant of freckles along his nose to the way his hair always falls errant along brow. That familiarity will not change.

"I thought," he says, "you are no stranger to solitude, nor the span of time. A year is but a blink."

.

At their next meeting, Fran is straddling the Strahl.

Balthier cannot walk a step beyond the hangar's doorway for at that sight it is as though the floor falls away.

She inches forward along the hull, thighs pressed wide against that metal. She is wielding some Moogle-made tool that she applies to the seams of the metalwork, sparking. She gleams in the dusty sunlight. The Strahl, also, is looking particularly fine.

"I'm glad to see my money has been well spent."

"How passed your service?"

Fran does not turn. She continues to inch forward, attending every rivet with complete focus. It is a habit of hers, he supposes, that she always touches before she attends and that she must always complete a task before she turns. Her fingers arch back that her fingertips can feel, free of claw. It is such a graceful, familiar motion that he aches. She has touched his lips like that, before she kisses; touched his cock like that. He watches her touch his ship like that, before she welds, and has to remember to breathe.

Balthier looses his pack and tosses it into a corner. His pace is even, though. He will not run.

"It passed like a four day old curry made of firewyrm bollocks," he says, his voice echoing, "but not unexpectedly so. 'Grab and check the magazine, man, it's not a woman's tit and oh, the shame, or you'd be set; are you eyeballing me, are you a queer, look to your front while I take your back, no complaining you greased grandmother, if you had one more brain it'd be fucking lonely.' Frankly," he shrugs, "a captain is a cockhead no matter the colors he wears. Do you know they nearly set me to artillery? I'm an engineer if not a pilot. Useless to set a tool to a task that doesn't suit."

He sets his fingers into the rungs that run up the Strahl's side. He feels old aches flare as he climbs, old wounds and strains from too long running at someone else's order. He notes Fran and Nono have not replaced the weapon system. He does not think he will. He has watched too many ships fall, now, and been forced to crawl out of the wreck of two and wonder at his own survival. Archades grows aggressive: Balthier will run again, he suspects, but not until Archades takes Balfonheim's horizons away from him.

Balthier balances as he walks the length of the Strahl's curve. Fran could not, he supposes, in her heels, hence the way she inches forward. He contemplates the way her buttocks meet the metal.

"Is she flight-ready?

"No." Fran pauses her task then, and tosses her head to clear her eyes. For an instant he catches a glimpse of her profile instead of the deceptive curve of her shoulders.

Her hair is bound in a tail, yet errant ringlets always fall loose about her cheekbones. That stray curl is a random frame for the fineness of her features. Once he looked at her and saw nothing but flatness, like a portrait of what a new-blinded man could dream a woman to be. Fran is deceptive, still, that he always sees that mask, that form, that beauty, before he remembers its protective purpose.

"Nono wrote me to say she was. Are you spinning stories again, Fran?"

Fran turns then. She gives him that tiny smile over which he wasted both himself and much-needed nights of sleep. Her ears shift with more vigor than that shallow Hume expression; she laughs at him, silently. Her eyes catch the sun's light.

Balthier has never known what color to call her eyes. Red, he thought, once, like a beast in the night, but they are not; brown, but not that either, unless perhaps in the way a river is brown to show instead only clarity when cupped in a palm. He could drink that color, whatever it is; tea, perhaps, made of soaked spice and clear water, and scented of cinnamon and apple.

"The Strahl is not flight-ready, or even flight-willing. She waits for her pilot."

"Might I, perchance, be able to offer a lovely lady such as yourself some assistance with that matter?"

"Experienced, are you," she says, or asks; he cannot read the tone of her voice.

"Only as experienced as four years of engineering in the Akademy and three years of practical and piratical flight can grant."

She flicks her ears, awry. A smirk, he recognises. "Ah, such a breadth of life lived. Have you an appreciation for innovation? This ship," Fran strokes that metal alongside her thigh in a way that makes his blood burn, "does not respond to any a man's crass and callous touch."

"That I approach everything arse-end first, to fly before I can run, to run before I can crawl, to lust before living, live before loving, love before trusting, I do say, somewhat wryly, yes, I appreciate innovation in design." Fran's eyes are on his hand where he props himself up. He leans forward to stroke the Strahl's curve with exaggerated motion. He sees the glint of white; Fran's teeth on her lip as she bites. "I must say, she's been put together most beautifully. I'm quite eager to get back aboard."

"Eagerness is a mark of youth."

"But let's not disdain, m'lady; not inexperience."

"Nor a mark of any other vice." Fran stands, then, and he sees his supposition regarding her balance flawed. She walks with an even, swaying stride to stand close enough to where he sits that he could kiss her kneecap. "I am glad you are back. I have been missing something."

"Nono wrote me regarding every significant design change. You haven't missed a thing from what I can tell."

"You, you fool." Her strong fingers curl through his hair. He closes his eyes to that touch, tightly enough he sees the stars. "To where shall we fly, my partner?"

"The middle of nowhere. The horizons are clear, and, well, there's no damned Archadians running about out there."

"Ah. Good. Nowhere is half-way home. Are you ready?"

"Aye aye."


End file.
